Unless you’ve been living under a rock for 30 years, you will be aware that society has long had issues with racism. It’s nice to imagine that we smart enough to know better, but that’s just a layer on top; subconsciously we are all racist.

Still, even though we know how much worse racism was in the past, it is still jarring to stumble across something so overtly and matter-of-factly racist as this, which I found in a National Geographic magazine from December 1916 (click to view full-size):

The relevant quote reads: “The aborigines of Australia are the lowest in intelligence of all human beings”.

If it’s any consolation, the author is long since dead (he died in 1952), his children (if he had any) are probably long dead, and their children (if they had any) are also probably dead.