Can you say more about the way that National Geographic covered race in the United States before recent decades?
The change happens in the 1970s, and I think the change can clearly be linked to changes in the broader American culture, and the place of African Americans in American society.
I think National Geographic was slow. If you look at other major magazines or newspapers, not just Life but Look and the [New York] Times and the Washington Post. … They were all further along than National Geographic was on issues of race, prior to the 1970s. You very infrequently saw African Americans in the pages of National Geographic. There was never a story about African Americans. There were in Life.
National Geographic showed you images of black people usually outside the center of the frame. And when they were outside the center of the frame, they were literally “toting that cotton, lifting that bale,” or they were working as domestic servants. … They were being naturalized in positions of economic and social inferiority. And when they were in the center of the frame, they were often cradling a white child or dusting off the mantelpiece of an elegant white home, or something like that.
That is how African Americans appeared, and that was reinforced by the ads. So you’d see an ad for the Pullman Company, and it’s an ad for the Pullman car, what are you going to have?
The porter!
Yes, the porter is helping the white family onto the train, making their bed. I mean, look, it’s not just National Geographic, we’re talking about the country. It was a segregated society where most white Americans were just very comfortable with white supremacy.
I’m curious as to what other kinds of American coverage National Geographic was printing. Were they covering other ethnic enclaves? If their goal was to show the reader “worlds that you never would visit otherwise,” then what was their approach to covering the United States?
There was an explicit editorial policy in National Geographic that they only published the happy stuff. … There was a rule that was essentially “Never say anything unpleasant about anyone.” That was one of the editorial rules. It was explicit, it was codified. And so they would do stories on ethnic enclaves, or they would more often do stories on Providence, Rhode Island, or Des Moines, Iowa, … cities, states, the Shenandoah Valley, or something like that. And yeah, if you would read them, you would see a kind of quaintness there.