D Magazine Booted off Grocery Store Magazine Rack

[TexasTowelie]

DALLAS - I don’t want to make a bigger deal out of this than it actually is, but this morning I got word that a Dallas grocery store took the November issue of D Magazine out of its magazine racks. Through our distributor, we were told that a customer had complained about the cover, which you can see a full rendering of here. I don’t know the specifics of the complaint; obviously I can’t ask the shopper why he or she was offended. And I’m not going to name the store because I don’t want to make the manager’s life more difficult than it has to be. We need grocery stores on our side; selling magazines is part of our business model. (Side note: I love it when someone says, “You’re just doing that to sell magazines!” Yes, we do sell magazines.)

OK, so. It’s just one store. It happens to be in an affluent, predominantly White part of town. But whatever. If you can’t find the November issue at your grocery store and if you don’t want to drive around looking for it, you can call Jacob at our front desk and buy a copy. 214-939-3636. He’s a good dude. You’ll like talking to him. Really, though, you should be a subscriber. For $20, you’ll get a year’s worth of great reading, and you’ll get the magazine before it shows up in grocery stores.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the cover itself and how we arrived at the design decisions we did.

Our November cover story, written by Zac Crain, is about the huge parking lot that borders the southeastern edge of Fair Park. That parking lot used to be a neighborhood. Driven in large part by racist antipathy directed at the Black folks who lived in about 300 houses there, the city of Dallas in the late ’60s and early ’70s used eminent domain to buy up the properties, displace the people who lived there, and pave over a swath of South Dallas. The story will go online next week.

Read more: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2021/11/d-magazine-booted-off-grocery-store-magazine-rack/

[Frasier Balzov]

1. They were probably offended by the offensive quote.

Either failing to recognize its historical context and scandalous implication or considering it to be best forgotten.