美国国家公共电台 NPR 'National Geographic' Turns The Lens On Its Own Racist History

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OK. National Geographic 1 became a cultural institution by bringing other cultures to Western readers. Now, in what it's calling The Race Issue, the magazine is issuing an apology. National Geographic says it often portrayed 2 foreign cultures through a racist 3 lens. And the way Nat Geo saw those cultures was how generations of Americans, especially white Americans, saw them, as well. As NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports, in the magazine's heyday 4 before the Internet or cable, most readers probably didn't know they were getting a narrow vision of the world.

ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE 5: Remote, exotic, vivid. National Geographic showed images of people and places most Americans never even knew existed.

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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: The photographers of National Geographic must try to bring the world and all that's in it to the pages of a magazine.

E. BLAIR: The world and all that's in it. Turns out, that wasn't quite true. But in the 1950s and '60s in white suburban 6 New Jersey 7, it didn't matter to Catherine Lutz.

CATHERINE LUTZ: And I devoured 8 every issue. It was this beautiful and exciting set of pictures and stories.

E. BLAIR: She even credits National Geographic with inspiring her to pursue a career in anthropology 9.

LUTZ: It stood for science. It stood for education. It was used prolifically 10 in schools. It also stood, though, for a kind of white view of the world.

E. BLAIR: Call it adventurous 11 American colonialism. The mandate 12 from one of its earliest editors? Print nothing controversial or unpleasant. Lutz, who teaches at Brown University, co-wrote the critique "Reading National Geographic" in 1993.

LUTZ: It's an ideal world that's safe and that's basically free of problems. Just lots and lots of smiles.

E. BLAIR: Nat Geo wasn't like Life or Time magazine. You didn't see the ugliness of war or poverty. You also didn't see progress being made in developing countries. For Jim Stanfield, that was kind of the point. He was a staff photographer for almost 30 years, beginning in the late 1960s.

JIM STANFIELD: I was trying to find tribal 13 areas where these people were a thousand or 2,000 years old, and I was trying to hunt a people that traveled by the same mode of transportation, dressed the same way, had the same kind of jewelry 14.

E. BLAIR: Stanfield, who is white, says showing, for example, half-naked women from those tribes wasn't racist.

STANFIELD: They were just trying to pass on different cultures and the way other people lived. And you couldn't go to Africa without seeing topless natives.

LUTZ: Well, that's true, but there's also a lot of places where you could see men with their penises out or, women with - men and women with genitals out. Those pictures never appear in the magazine. So they made choices all the time.

E. BLAIR: In 1962, for example, an article about South Africa barely mentioned the brutal 15 Sharpeville massacre 16 from two years earlier in which white police killed and wounded some 250 black protesters, including women and children.

JIM BLAIR: That article was a disgrace.

E. BLAIR: Jim Blair, who's also white, was another photographer just starting out at Nat Geo in the early 1960s.

J. BLAIR: It was written by someone who was old, was very rigid 17 and was pro-segregationist.

E. BLAIR: And here's where small changes begin at the magazine. Jim Blair says he was part of a generation of photographers who fought the status quo.

J. BLAIR: We were in our 30s. The people who were running the magazine were in their 60s. So there was a 30-year gap. And of course we wanted change. We wanted it to reflect what was going on in the 1960s and not what was going on in the 1940s, the kind of country club attitude that white people had towards blacks.

E. BLAIR: In the 1970s, Blair took a now famous photo of Winnie Mandela on a trip to South Africa to cover apartheid and oppression. John Edwin Mason is an African-American historian. He was recently hired by Nat Geo to look through the archives for the new Race Issue. He says it took individual dissenters 18 like Blair to force change.

JOHN EDWIN MASON: Until the 1970s, I don't think that those dissenters got very much traction 19. But I think it's important to recognize that they were there. And internal change doesn't just happen automatically.

E. BLAIR: Four years ago, Susan Goldberg became Nat Geo's first female and first Jewish editor. She recently hired Debra Adams Simmons, an African-American, as the magazine's culture editor. Simmons says one of their goals, diverse stories and storytellers.

DEBRA ADAMS SIMMONS: That's not to say that as professionals we can't tell other people's stories. But I also think that we're living in a time where people should be able to tell their own stories, and that's what we're trying to achieve.

E. BLAIR: Still, the cover of Nat Geo's new Race Issue is an image taken by a white male. And the photography staff is still majority white. Times change, values change. Institutions can be slow to catch up. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News, Washington.