Beyoncé, Barack Obama, and Jay Z Appeared Whitewashed In a WikiHow Illustration

Beyoncé, Barack Obama, and Jay Z all appear in a whitewashed illustration on wikiHow but the site learned from their mistake.

The website WikiHow provides simple and easy instructions for everything from How To Skip Rocks to How To Overcome Failure, which I’ve bookmarked for later. The site also features really cute little illustrations to accompany their instructions.

Like this one of How To Get Rid of a Runny Nose:

Or this one on the difficult task of playing fetch with your cat:

But recently the company posted an article on How To Become A Congressman that made users do a double-take. The illustration for the “How To” guide looked familiar but something was off. It appeared to be a recreation of this photo of President Obama, Beyoncé, and Jay Z:

But in the illustration everyone looked slightly different–they looked whiter.

So how could this happen and why? wikiHow pretty quickly realized their error and removed the whitewashed image from their site and tweeted an apology:

WikiHow handled this the best they could after the fact: immediately taking action and researching what happened. But it should’ve never happened to begin with. Diversifying not only illustrators but (as they mentioned in their tweet) their staff as a whole, “especially in positions of power”, is important to eliminating these mistakes.

We’ve recently seen other public accusations of whitewashing such as the role Tilda Swinton played in Doctor Strange. But that’s not the only case, there’s an ongoing issue in Hollywood of whitewashing. Matt Damon was cast as the lead in a film called The Great Wall, Scarlett Johansson is in The Ghost in the Shell, and recently Joseph Fiennes (a white guy) was cast to play Michael Jackson.

When we see whitewashing, we must continue to raise an issue with it. The more we call out the whitewashing we see, the more people take notice.