If
National Geographic's
April issue was going to be entirely devoted to the subject of race, the magazine decided it had better take a good hard look at its own history.
Editor in Chief Susan Goldberg asked
John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, to dive into the magazine's nearly 130-year archive and report back.
What Mason found was a long tradition of racism in the magazine's coverage: in its text, its choice of subjects, and in its famed photography.
