Bloomberg Businessweek under fire for 'racist' cover

Bloomberg Businessweek has caused an uproar for using offensive stereotypes of minorities to illustrate a story on the housing rebound.

The magazine has expressed regret over the cover of last week's issue, which featured images of minorities, including a barefoot black man with exaggerated features, grabbing wads of cash in a house overflowing with money. 

An African-American woman with large lips is shown feeding a dog. In other rooms of the house, Latino women are grabbing and holding cash. The cover features this headline: "The Great American Housing Rebound. Flips. No-look bids. 300 percent returns. What could possibly go wrong?"

Reaction on Twitter was scathing. Matt Yglesias of Slate wrote: "If you like your business news spiced up with racism, turn to the latest @businesweek cover." Forbes' Jeff Bercovici added: "What can everyone who had anything to do with this Businessweek cover have been thinking?"

The Huffington Post described the cover as "racist chic."

Writing on the website of the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum noted that minorities were targeted by predatory lenders responsible for part of the housing bubble. Many who qualified for conventional mortgages were pushed into risky, high-cost, subprime loans, a fact that the Businessweek cover fails to point out.

"In other words, minority borrowers were disproportionately victimized in the bubble," he writes. "But Businessweek here has them on the cover bathing in housing-ATM cash, implying that they’re going to create another bubble. That’s not okay."

Josh Tyrangiel, Bloomberg Businessweek's editor-in-chief, expressed regret over the uproar. "Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret," he wrote in a statement sent to Politico. "Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we'd do it differently."

The artist reportedly behind the image, Andres Guzman, writes on his Tumblr page that he "was asked to make an excited family with large quantities of money."

Both the NAACP and the National Association of Black Journalists had no immediate comment.

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