For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
This is inane, as it conflates the connotation of "race" and the very useful concept of a "population". We should all be aware enough to know the terrible history of the idea of race. But there are well known distributions of certain features among different populations, melanin being one of them, physical prowess another, but also body height and weight.
Everyone can see folks from East Africa excell at long distance running, and athletes of Caribbean descent in sprint events. Jews excell at winning Nobel prizes and wars in which they are insanely outnumbered. If you want you can call it an "overrepresenation", but that is really wording.
If it becomes fashionable to view facts that denote population distributions as racist we as a society have lost, for the foundation of having discussions based on reason and truth will have been considerably diminished.
Putting it simply: If you give me a 1000 pictures from folks from Kongo, and 1000 pictures of Inuit, I'll eat my hat if I can't correctly identify the origin of 99% of them. (Never discount the possibility of a Kongolese moving to Qaqortoq a hundred years ago.)
"I was a racist prior to the 70s. Here's some articles where I show clear racism from that time. In the 70s I had a change of heart. Here's some articles from the 2000s where I clearly show that I am no longer a racist, but in fact the opposite of a racist."
This would not be an apology, because it doesn't stop at showing one's previous racism. It continues on to try to give evidence of current virtue as if that were a remedy for past racism. However, the real problems generated by racism are not cured by changing your position on race.
The NG article puts this in the proper context of intention:
>But when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze to others.
Do they mean they are going to expose other magazines as being racist? While that might be historically interesting, it doesn't seem remotely professional. If they are planning to publish such exposes, then the current article is clearly an attempt to preempt the natural claims that NG was racist too.