Watch out, white America! Dark people are buying houses again. [via Slate]
Update: The artwork (which does not include the text) was by Andres Guzman, who was born in Lima, Perú. [hat tip: Greg B.]
Did a cover for Businessweek about the current housing market boom.
I was asked to make an excited family with large quantities of money. I slipped in my lovely cat, Boo which was my favorite part. Too bad I wasn’t asked to draw large quantities of cats. Drawing dollars was a drag.
This suggests that as far as the artist was concerned, the depiction was a creative, rather than an editorial decision. But there’s more to a cover than the art: there’s the text added to it and the context created by the story it illustrates. Jamelle Bouie:
It’s not just the black and Latino caricatures—the whole cover plays into the widely-debunked myth that unreliable minority borrowers were responsible for the financial crash. As Ryan Chittum notes for the Columbia Journalism Review, the truth is that they were disproportionately victimized by unscrupulus lenders. This cover, however, all but implies that minorities are primed to cause another crisis. It’s garbage.
Update 2: BusinessWeek apologizes. [Yahoo News]
“Our cover illustration got strong reactions, which we regret,” Josh Tyrangiel, Bloomberg Businessweek’s editor-in-chief, said in a statement to Yahoo! News. “If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.”