{"id":56013,"date":"2018-03-24T19:49:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-24T19:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56013"},"modified":"2018-03-25T02:37:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-25T02:37:19","slug":"national-geographic-replaces-racist-fictions-with-post-racial-fantasies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56013","title":{"rendered":"National Geographic Replaces Racist Fictions With Post-racial Fantasies"},"content":{"rendered":"

National Geographic<\/strong> Replaces Racist Fictions With Post-racial Fantasies<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

New York Magazine<\/a>
\n2018-03-16<\/p>\n

Lauren Michele Jackson<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nPhoto: Courtesy of National Geographic<\/em><\/a>. Photograph by Robin Hammond<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In her honest but odd memoir<\/a> that it seems, thankfully, few besides me have read, National Geographic<\/em><\/a> emerges as a crucial touchstone to Rachel Dolezal\u2019s<\/a> supposed racial awakening. Isolated regionally and culturally by Christian-fundamentalist<\/a> parents, copies of the magazine were one of the few tokens from 1980s and \u201990s American culture allowed to Dolezal in a home that forbade television and processed food. And while her older brother scrounged pages for photos of topless women, NatGeo<\/em> begat Rachel\u2019s earliest racial fantasies. Coating herself in mud from head to feet, she \u201cwould pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert<\/a> or one of the Bantu<\/a> women living in the Congo<\/a>,\u201d images conjured exclusively by the monthly magazine. \u201cI would stay in this fantasy world as long as I possibly could,\u201d Dolezal writes. \u201cIt was never long enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the last century, National Geographic<\/em> has used the guise of ethnographic research to stoke the racial imaginations of curious white people. Investigating peoples and cultures like flora, splaying their images upon glossy pages with unchecked fascination, the magazine does not have a great track record when it comes to stories about people of color. And yet, these are the stories NatGeo<\/em> is most famous for, training generation after generation to gawk at peoples other than themselves through telephoto lenses. Founded in 1888 to document the interests of affluent explorers, the name alone evokes a colonial impulse \u2014 the National Geographic Society<\/a> started as a private club dedicated to worldly, exotic travel. The publication has long been an unrepentant descendant of those beginnings \u2014 until now, allegedly…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The magazine\u2019s April issue, \u201cThe Race Issue,\u201d promises to reckon with an editorial history it describes precisely as \u201cracist.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,8,10,20],"tags":[1471,28177,26189,28249,15296,28250,15901,12972,28127,20241,28248,151],"class_list":["post-56013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-uk","category-usa","tag-jared-sexton","tag-john-edwin-mason","tag-lauren-michele-jackson","tag-marcia-briggs","tag-martin-luther-king-jr","tag-millie-briggs","tag-national-geographic","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-patricia-edmonds","tag-rachel-dolezal","tag-susan-goldberg","tag-tavia-nyongo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56014,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56013\/revisions\/56014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}