
For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist - johnny313
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/from-the-editor-race-racism-history/
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c06n
> Race is not a biological construct, as writer Elizabeth Kolbert explains in
> this issue, but a social one that can have devastating effects.

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.)

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NelsonMinar
You read this whole article and that's the thing you came away with?

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scrupulusalbion
Suppose this were an individual's own blog post:

"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.

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cafard
About all I can say is, No kidding.

