From Fox News Latino:
Bloomberg Businessweek Apologizes After Controversial Cover Draws Fire
By Victor Garcia
Published February 28, 2013
Bloomberg Businessweek was forced to apologize after a controversial cover drew the ire of minority groups.
In last week's issue, the weekly magazine had a cover about the housing bubble that featured a money-filled, two-story house inhabited by two Latinos and two African-Americans. The cartoons look like they’re racist caricatures from the early 1900s greedily grabbing money, critics say.
The Columbia Journalism Review was taken aback by the imagery, writing a blistering piece that said the cover was “not okay.”
"It’s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process," Ryan Chittum wrote for the CJR.
In a statement to Fox New Latino, Bloomberg Businessweek said they wish they had chosen a different cover.
"Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret," the statement said. "Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we'd do it differently."
The illustrator who was commissioned to do the cover, Andrés Guzmán, was born in Peru.
Here's this R. Crumb-like caricaturtist's blog and Tumblr account. Guzman's art isn't really to my taste, but I can see why Bloomberg employs him.
Here's the offending cover:
Oh, wait ... my mistake! These pictures above are not Guzman's, they are the 2002 mural "Stepping into the American Dream" that the Bush Administration commissioned Miami painter Xavier Cortada to paint during George W. Bush's White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership, which kicked off the Housing Bubble.
From a 2002 Housing and Urban Development press release:
WASHINGTON – Miami-based Cuban-American artist Xavier Cortada today unveiled his mural, Stepping into the American Dream, in a ceremony hosted by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez.
Cortada painted the mural at the White House Conference on Minority Homeownership, held on October 15 in Washington, DC. The painting illustrates the Blueprint for the American Dream Partnership, a collaborative effort of the Bush Administration and members of the housing industry to meet the President’s goal of 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the year 2010.
Here's the offending cover:
In a statement to Fox New Latino, Bloomberg Businessweek said they wish they had chosen a different cover
ReplyDeleteYes, a cover that featured plenty of white people instead.
When one tries to point out the explicit anti-white message built into so much visual media, various liberals will snort contemptuously saying something like: "I've worked in advertizing for years I've never seen a memo dictating that white people be shown negatively. You're just a conspiracy nutcase"
But the quote from the article gives the game away. Everyone in that business understands that minorities cannot be shown in a bad light. The easiest way to do that is to show whites in a bad light by contrast with non-whites.
The beauty is its never done positively, no one has to be told to do it they just need to know there is no penalty for anti-white bias.
That has to be the most politically incorrect cover since Tim Burton's PLANET OF THE APES and National Review's cover of Clinton's as Chinese.
ReplyDeleteOne of your funniest bits ever, Steve.
ReplyDeleteYou were trying to be funny, right?
I downloaded Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds today. Great sentence in the intro:
We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go made in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
It's one thing for the WH to have an initiative to put more ethnic minorities into SFRs, but to acknowledged that it actually worked would be racist.
ReplyDeleteAnd here I thought that they were just trying to illustrate Americans of a different hue than the majority! If they had shown only white people, surely that would be racist.
ReplyDeleteAnybody outside of the sand states who wants to know what the new "vibrancy" looks like, have a gander at that mural. Only they usually feature an Aztec warrior and/or gang-banger in an undershirt.
ReplyDeletehttp://siskelandebert.org/video/4GY2D67MBX3D/Sneak-Previews-Guilty-Pleasures
ReplyDeleteThe Businessweek cartoonist is a moderately vibrant Conquistador-American, so his job is probably safe.
ReplyDeleteMr. Guzman's tumblr blog is here.
ReplyDeleteA talented young-ish (born 1968) man with a vibrant illustration style. He's also a part of the SteakMob Collective. Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteGuzman sure seems to have looked at a lot of R. Crumb's cartoons. Much of what's in our present culture is still stuck in the 1960's. Tere's nothing like 'Cheap Thrills,' is there?
I was a witness of this in the Central Valley of California in the 2000s. I could only afford to purchase a small condo in Santa Clara county, there were immigrants at my work that had lower positions than me that were able to get a government secured loan at a lower interest rate. I chose to buy a place in the Central Valley and commute. In the early 2000s, I noticed numerous new latino homeowners in the Valley, many of whom I never heard speak English. It was a mystery of how they could afford $300K-$500K homes. All of those I noticed foreclosed about 2008.
ReplyDeleteOne sign that the cover is likely to offend many Latino and black people is that I started laughing when I scrolled down to it. I disagree with your point here, Steve, but for posting the funny image.
ReplyDeleteBe fruitful and multiply your forces. Go leave comments on those discussing this; see the links here.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively or for extra credit, look up those involved on Twitter then contact *their friends* with the goal of discrediting them.
For instance, search who talks to @MattYglesias, then point out how he's wrong.
The hacks at Minitrue need to get their act together. The Mortgage Meltdown was never due to minority defaults. Banks were never very strongly encouraged to lend to minorities by the government. It was and has always been solely about the greed of White bankers. We should expect that if we peel back enough layers it must have been bankers who are Christian White Southern Men who are bright, have worked hard, and have been successful. In other words, evil racists who were given unfair privilege.
ReplyDelete"That has to be the most politically incorrect cover since Tim Burton's PLANET OF THE APES and National Review's cover of Clinton's as Chinese."
ReplyDeleteI see someone has been trained well. What's 'wrong' with it is that it suggests a negative fact about NAMs that we aren't supposed to know or think about. It's evil because its true.
I am absolutely sure that the editor and everyone on staff had no thought whatsoever that this cover could be considered "racist." It looks like the standard, ubiquitious illustration of "an America that looks like America," the kind of illustration that has been legion for about 20 years.
ReplyDeleteYes, wiser heads saw it after publication and their inner alarm bells went off: "Non-whites are being portrayed as doing something non-saintly - crimethink alert! And the subject is the housing bubble and foreclosures (which we know were non-white skewed, from White House policy on down) - DOUBLEPLUS UNGOOD! Scotch this, and quick."
The 1st Anon. said
>no one has to be told to [skew ads racially,] they just need to know there is no penalty for anti-white bias<
Actually what communicates the anti-white party line is demonstrations - like this one - that there is a huge penalty for portraying non-whites as human beings (venal like everyone else). If your friends in advertising demand to be shown "the memo," then show them this story. It is the memo. And it's only one "memo" of many that the culture-critiquers have issued over the years.
A lot of industry people got "the message" with this one, I wager.
And look at the cowards apologizing, bowing and scraping before their true masters. And people still think (or only claim?) that the media aren't controlled.
And then there's the luck of the Irish.
ReplyDeleteHispanic art, both the Indio and blanco sort, is shockingly primitive.
ReplyDeleteYeah, some editor approved that cover because he misjudged the exceedingly fine line between being inclusive of melanin-enabled folks (like the rule that all doctors, lawyers, computer geniuses and so-forth on TV are black or vibrant, unless they are evil), and mocking them.
ReplyDeleteIf the folks caricatured on that cover had been white, that editor would be in trouble for under-inclusiveness (racism). He avoided that crime but he allowed the artist to over-egg the pudding. In the future (if he keeps his job) he will remember: to each two black figures in an illustration add one hispanic (a darkish asian may be substituted) and one white. The white must look foolish or wicked, and the blacks must look noble or at least jovial.
That mural by Coitado-- excuse me, Cortada-- looks like Putumayo Records commissioned Michael Birawer to do their album covers.
ReplyDeleteOne more time: as if these people commissioned this fellow.
ReplyDeleteOne sign that the cover is likely to offend many Latino and black people is that I started laughing when I scrolled down to it.
ReplyDeleteNo kidding. I mean, that black guy leaning out the front window with a cheese-eating grin and a fist full of money -- really, if they'd hired a white supremacist artist to paint something satirizing minority-targeted home loans, could he have come up with something better?
It's amazing how, when liberals are so well-insulated by like-minded people that they never ever encounter the kind of racism they claim is endemic to society, they can forget to recognize the warning signs. Only in an office where everyone is so liberal that they're convinced they could never do anything racist even on accident could something like this be approved.
In an ordinary office where there might be some token conservatism to keep the liberals on their toes, someone would have spotted the problem with this immediately and blocked it, probably burning all copies in the parking lot just to make sure no one saw it.
The real non-PC is in the text:
ReplyDelete"What could possibly go wrong?"
Sailer catchphrase!
Gilbert P.