Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

When Amanda Wanklin and Michael Biggs fell in love, they “didn’t give a toss” about the challenges they might face as a biracial couple, Amanda says. “What was more important was what we wanted together.” They settled down in Birmingham, England, eager to start a family. On July 3, 2006, Amanda gave birth to fraternal twin girls, and the ecstatic parents gave their daughters intertwined names: One would be Millie Marcia Madge Biggs, the other Marcia Millie Madge Biggs. From a young age the girls had similar features but very different color schemes. Marcia had light brown hair and fair skin like her English-born mother. Millie had black hair and brown skin like her father, who’s of Jamaican descent. “We never worried about it; we just accepted it,” Michael says.…

On the way to collect his Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. made a stop in London at the invitation of Canon John Collins of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The congregation of 4,000 packed the cathedral on the morning of December 6, 1964, to hear the words of the visionary preacher. King’s service included a version of “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” a sermon he first delivered in 1954 as a pastoral candidate for Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. His address encouraged those captivated by his oratory: “Be the best of whatever you are. And when you do this, you’ve mastered the length of life.” At a press conference following the service, King answered questions about race relations in the United Kingdom and…

Halil proposed to Jade by writing WILL YOU MARRY ME in the sand on a beach. Both wanted a small, frugal wedding. Jade wore a Rent the Runway dress for their vows, witnessed by a few friends, at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan. Jade Calliste-Edgar is an African-American woman raised in Florida. Halil Binici is a Turkish man raised in Istanbul. The two 23-year-olds live in New York City, where Halil works as a cameraman and Jade is in graduate school, studying to be a mental health counselor. During two days in fall 2017, they were one of numerous pairs of mixed race or ethnicity who tied the knot at the Manhattan marriage bureau, then happily posed for National Geographic photographer Wayne Lawrence. Jade and Halil also are part…

STREETS IN HIS NAME Wendi C. Thomas is editor and publisher of the website MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. She also writes for ESPN about racial and economic justice. SKIN DEEP Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1999. Her most recent book is The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. SKIN DEEP Robin Hammond took photos of nine-year-olds around the globe and asked them about gender for the Geographic’s January 2017 issue on the topic. WHAT DIVIDES US David Berreby’s award-winning latest book, Us and Them: The Science of Identity, explores the human instinct to separate into groups. WHAT DIVIDES US John Stanmeyer, who has worked for National Geographic since 2004, uses his photography, writing, and filmmaking to explore issues around the world. A PLACE OF…

When people saw the brown skin of Brazilian Angélica Dass and the pink tones of her Spanish husband, they would theorize about the color of their future children. For clues, Dass looked at her family, whose European and African skin tones range from “pancakes to peanuts to chocolate.” In 2012 she photographed herself, her then husband, and their families to show this medley. She’d match a strip of pixels from their noses to a color card from Pantone, the longtime authority on color standards. So began “Humanae,” a project that has collected 4,000 portraits and myriad human colors in 18 countries. Skin color still determines treatment in the 21st century. “This dehumanizationof human beings is happeningnow,” Dass says. “On the border of Libya and in our everyday lives, when someone…

Britain has been a multicultural society for centuries. To the extent that racial homogeneity has ever existed anywhere, it has certainly never characterized this clutter of islands in the North Sea that has been home to Africans, for example, far longer than it has been home to the English. Continuing archaeological finds give evidence that black people lived in Roman Britain before the Germanic Angles and Saxons brought pillage and destruction in their wake. The dark hair and eyes that are still romanticized in Britain as Celtic features more likely come from the Mediterranean. The thousands of African, Caribbean, and Asian people who inhabited Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries had disappeared by the Victorian era, their genes dispersed far and wide throughout Britain’s gene pool, their physical and…

32% Northern European 28% Southern European 21% Sub-Saharan African 14% Southwest Asian/North African An interest in who begat us goes back at least to the Bible. These days the genealogical impulse is buttressed by modern genetics, which weaves individual stories into the grand migration of humankind. These six people had their DNA tested with National Geographic’s kit (see below). The results indicate essentially the same “racial” heritage, in the percentages shown above. But their experiences are unique. Brenda Yurkoski (lower left) knew before the test—which names ancestral populations, not individuals—that her list of ancestors includes Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s slave and mistress. “It was my fourth great-grandfather who came up with the formula to determine whether you were black or whether you were white in America,” she says.…

HISTORY Israel and the Palestinian territories include homelands of both Jews and Palestinians. In the 19th century, Zionism— the movement for the creation of a Jewish state—gathered strength, drawing hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants to the area. In 1948 Zionist dreams became reality with the establishment of Israel. When war broke out between the new nation and its Arab neighbors, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes. DIFFERENCES Religion and ethnicity play a role, but the conflict is really a struggle over territory and sovereignty. Extremists on both sides reject compromise, holding the exclusion of the other as a cherished ideal that must not be traded away for politics. CONFLICT SPARK Attacks in response to Israeli control of occupied territories and Jewish settlement are met…

Even after the coal mines closed and the factory jobs disappeared and the businesses began taking down their signs on Broad Street, even after the population started its steady decline and the hospital was on the brink of bankruptcy, the residents of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, flocked downtown for the annual Funfest. For years Sally Yale participated in the fall parade in a souped-up teacup salvaged from a spinning ride at the shuttered amusement park. Tricked out with smoking dry ice, it was the perfect advertisement for her gourmet coffee shop. Yale is 53, but her angular face lights up like a child’s when she talks about Funfest. The applause from the crowd. The Hazletonians who returned for the celebration. “And the food,” Yale says, lifting her brows and rolling her eyes…

How has the industry changed since you started acting in the mid-1990s? When I started out it was challenging because there were very few roles for women who looked like me. I was even told by an agent that it was impossible for an Indian woman to make it in Hollywood. It was disappointing to hear, but it did not deter me. I know things are slightly changing, but if we look at it as a whole over the past 20 years, I think it’s safe to say that there are still only a very tiny percentage of leading roles in Hollywood films for women of color, let alone for women of Indian origin. Do you see diversity reflected on screen? There are a lot of well-meaning programs out there…

JAHMAL COLE West 95th Street, Chicago, Illinois (Stopped in 2017) Cole was pulled over near his Chicago home by a police officer who wrongly claimed he was not wearing a seat belt. Cole, whose aunt had been accidentally shot and killed by a Chicago officer in 2015, said it was his fourth police stop in a two-month period. WOODROW VEREEN, JR. Fairfield Avenue, Bridgeport, Connecticut (2015) Vereen’s two young sons were riding with him when he was stopped and searched by police for running a yellow light. He won a cash settlement after suing police over the illegal search and now struggles with what to tell his children about how to regard the police. JUDGE ROBERT L. WILKINS I-68, Exit 43C, Cumberland, Maryland (1992) Wilkins and three family members were…

Susan Goldberg: The museum has been an overwhelming success; visitors have to order tickets months in advance. To what do you attribute that passionate interest? Lonnie Bunch: I think part of it is that so many people really wanted to understand the full history of the United States. A lot of people find this a pilgrimage. The most amazing thing is to watch grandparents talk to grandchildren about an event they lived through or to see people cross racial lines to find common ground over things that once divided us. It really has become a place whose time is now and whose story is so important to all of us. The human scale allows people to feel that they can talk about issues. Suddenly they’re thinking, That could be me.…