Growing up, I used to love to page through my aunt’s National Geographic, grooving on the photos. These gave me the idea that the world was a wide and wonderful place, full of infinite variety. Somehow it never crossed my mind that I was Being A Racist.
But now, thanks to an “investigation” (good grief) by a University of Virginia professor, the new editor of National Geographic says she now realizes that “Our coverage was racist… for generations”. Oh, the pain.
Says the professor—really, what would we do without our colleges?—National Geographic wickedly presented a lot of people in Third World countries as “exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.”
The editor laments, “People of color [as we depicted them] were not often surrounded by technologies of automobiles, airplanes or trains or factories,” boo-hoo. And it was all because of Racism. It couldn’t possibly be, could it, that people in the Congo rain forest or the highlands of New Guinea in the 1950s didn’t actually have a lot of cars and planes and trains. Obviously they should have all been depicted as Connecticut commuters in three-piece suits.
To put it right, National Geographic next month will put out a special Apologizing for Our Dastardly Racism issue, owning up to all their racist sins since the magazine was founded in 1888. And promising never to do it again.
Do these people, even in their wildest imaginings, think anyone in the Andes Mountains or the Solomon Islands *cares* what National Geographic said about them in, say, 1925? Do they really think they’re that important?
But we are talking about liberals infected with the PC virus: that, or a group therapy session that has gotten out of hand. It’s not about what all those people in all those faraway countries think. It’s about what libs think of themselves and each other. It’s always about them, every single time. They moan and groan about how bad they used to be so they can brag about how good they are now. We’ve learned to call it “virtue signaling.” It’s supposed to impress us. And it’s certainly supposed to impress other liberals, who will get down-hearted when they find that they themselves can’t compete with the editors of National Geographic for the quality and quantity of past misdeeds. They’ll have to come up with something better than “I used to watch ‘Amos and Andy’ on TV.” Maybe hold another workshop about “White Privilege,” then go out and break some things.
The fact is that, once upon a time, there really were cannibals in New Guinea and headhunters in Borneo—as much as the Diversity mob now wishes to convince us that there weren’t. Somehow their definition of Diversity always works its way around to uniformity. It has to: the multicultural ideology insists that all cultures are equally good. Except ours, of course. They don’t like ours.
Today such pastimes as cannibalism and head-hunting are verging on extinction, thanks largely to the efforts of Christian missionaries and volunteer medics and teachers from the West. Their efforts are now augmented by those of home-grown missionaries, medics, and teachers, who can minister to the people in their own language—and are wise enough to understand that not every aspect of the indigenous culture has to be changed. Indeed, some of those home-grown missionaries have left home to venture abroad and minister to the peoples of the fallen West, trying to stanch the spiritual bleeding. It may yet prove that they got here just in time. Somewhere there’s an African Dr. Livingston trying to raise up the natives in the moral wilderness of England. He won’t find any headhunters, but he’ll find more than enough pagans to go around.
I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in a read a few posts. A single click will get you there.
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