Ugh.
As you can see with your eyes, Business Week‘s latest cover features grotesque caricatures of people of color that run dangerously close to pickaninny cartoons. The story is “The Great American Housing Rebound,” and it’s clearly implying that the current U.S. real estate bubble is about to burst because even people of color can purchase homes. And you know if that’s true, things much be bad!
You can’t look at this without thinking back to the subprime mortgage crisis, when minorities were unfairly targeted. So, yeah, the original collapse didn’t happen because people of color got all fancy and thought they could own stuff, it happened because shady mortgage lenders and Wall Street banks screwed us all. If this cartoon wanted to be accurate, it would be a boardroom with a bunch of white men snorting hundred dollar bills with other hundred dollar bills.
And not only is this thing racist as fuck, it’s also stupid. If those people on the cover have all that fucking money, why are they living in one house? Duhhh.
Businessweek, please be better than this.
[Slate]