rogers park bryan wrote:
Id say its much ado about nothing.
Just Youtube idiots being Youtube idiots and the media latched on because we havent had a mass murder in a few weeks
Cheerios commercial with interracial family stirred faux controversy
The Cheerios commercial that sent shock waves through the media was so controversial that I had to watch it twice to figure out what I was missing.
An adorable little girl is asking her mother about the cereal’s heart-healthy benefits. A sleeping dad has a pile of Cheerios on his chest, ostensibly placed there by a daughter who misunderstood the product’s cholesterol-clearing mechanism.
Oh, the father in the spot is black, the mother is white, and the daughter looks like a blend of the two. Is it surprising that some took exception to this portrayal and posted hateful rhetoric in the comments of a YouTube video of the ad?
Part of the Internet’s function, in fact, might be as an anonymous release valve for society’s disgruntled, dislocated and disturbed. For those who perceive themselves as powerless against the changing tides of culture, economy and demographics, the misspelled, caps-lock ugliness spouted online is their power.
In a most reasonable manner, General Mills asked to disable comments on the YouTube video featuring the spot. This became national news.
The reaction to the reaction was over-the-top. News reports said the spot and the reaction to it sparked a heated conversation about race and forced us to confront attitudes about interracial families.
This plays directly to the aim of the trolls. They want us to think there is something abnormal about a completely normal situation. They want to plant seeds of doubt that we might actually live in a country in which a sizable proportion of the population takes issue with a biracial child and parents as controversial as whole grain oats.
They want us to believe we live in an America completely different from the one that actually exists.
In fact, mixed race marriages in America have grown by 28 percent over a decade, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, from 7 to 10 percent.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans said it “would be fine” with them if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group, according to a 2012 Pew Research study.
We’ve gone from a country, which in 1986 had just a third of its citizens viewing intermarriage as acceptable, to one in which more than a third say that a close relative is married to someone of a different race, according to Pew researchers.
The purported controversy over an ad featuring such a family is much ado over nothing.
There will always be knuckle-draggers among us, who shout horribly racist comments online. Why amplify their voice?
And there will always be those who prefer to date or marry within their race or ethnicity.
When General Mills comes out taking a stand against the bigots and standing by their commercial, it’s great free publicity associated with their brand.
“Do we really want to hear the hate pour forth from all the whackos on the planet who have access to YouTube, each of them posting 40 kabillion times under different aliases to make their numbers seem larger? No. We get it. You’re racist. Let it be your secret,” says Los Angeles-based writer Cynthia Liu, who blogs about about race, culture, gender and parenting.
“This is a tempest in a cereal bowl, right?” Liu said. In fact, she posits that Cheerios’ move could even be an “upside-down, inside-out” way to dog-whistle to open-minded parents who otherwise might not buy the cereal.
The most reasonable way to explain all the attention this has generated has come from the 6-year-old star of the commercial, Grace Colbert, whose mother told MSNBC that her daughter thought all the fuss was over her great smile.
Wisdom from the mouth of babes.
This is a weak article because it fails to distinguish black-white relations from other interracial relationships (asian-hispanic, white-asian, etc.) It may be true that interracial relationships in the U.S. have increased in the past twenty years. But have interracial relationships between blacks and whites? That dividing line has historically been much more difficult to cross than other racial barriers.
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
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