After all he’s been through, Obama doesn’t deserve this. Wikipedia’s sister how-to website WikiHow has had to apologise for a “disgraceful” cartoon featured in a “How to become a congressman” piece.
The piece showed an image of Obama, Beyoncé and Jay-Z talking in the White house, but actually turned them white. Nice.
Images comparing the cartoon image to the original one, taken at a fundraising event in New York in 2012, began to appear over Twitter after it was posted by a Beyoncé fan account on Monday.
A Wikihow representative responded on Twitter apologising for the mistake…
… Before they released a more in-depth apology, stating that the site is “disgusted and ashamed” to have recreated the image like this and doesn’t believe that the image was “intentionally whitewashed”.
Founder of wikiHow, Jack Herrick, said that the image has now been removed alongside the instruction accompanying it, continuing to say that the article is being re-written and re-drawn.
He said, “One person sketches, the other person colors. The sketcher sent the colorist a black and white sketch. The colorist did not know the race of the models [and] wasn’t aware it was Obama and Beyoncé. We don’t think the illustrator intentionally whitewashed here.
“This doesn’t excuse the fact that we hosted a terrible image on wikiHow and we needed more diversity on that article, period. We’re talking with our illustrators to prevent recurrence and encourage diversity. Especially in positions of power.”