Magazine Cover Promotes Age Old Stereotypes

Today I found an article that exemplifies many of the issues that we have been discussing in class about race. The article was actually a response to a magazine cover that many people found to be racist. The cover (right) belongs to a highly acclaimed financial magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek. This cover art depicts a home overflowing with money and four people sitting inside the house. The four people all appear to be minorities, either Latino or African American. When the drawing is viewed in relation to the title, "The Great American Housing Rebound", it still doesn't quite make sense. I would expect that the article would be talking about how minorities are helping to improve the housing market but instead the article talks about the housing market in Phoenix which I would assume readers are supposed to contextualize is a city filled with minorities. Other than this, the cover of the magazine seems very irrelevant.

What stood out to me when I first saw the cover was the expression of the African American man in the lower right hand corner. His exaggerated features and crazed look eerily reminded me of the 20th century cartoon clips and posters that we viewed in class a few weeks ago. Dedrick Muhammad, a senior director of economics at the NAACP said that,"[the drawing] still puts forth a historically racist depiction that minorities are out grabbing money and benefiting from it". Muhammad seems to illuminate an unspoken fear that the white majority seems to hold against many minorities in America. There always seems to be a new (minority) group to blame for the problems in the country.

In order to combat the criticism, the magazine's editor wrote an apology that said, "Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions,which we regret. Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again, we'd do it differently"(Politico). Obviously, the magazine did not intend to be present a racist imagine but their apology could not seem any less heartless to me. The editor never outright says that the magazine regretted publishing the image but rather that they regret the "strong reactions" that will now taint the name of their magazine. Instances like these make me wonder how far our society has come from the racist beliefs of the past. I am confident that racism still exists but with little "mistakes" like this one, the hope of progression may never be fulfilled in our lifetimes.