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Cheerios ad with mixed-race family draws racist responses

A new Cheerios commercial featuring a biracial family has prompted a debate over race in America after drawing a host of ugly remarks online.

The commercial features a biracial daughter asking her white mother if Cheerios are good for your heart, and then dumping a batch on her black father’s chest to playfully help his heart while he is sleeping on the couch. Some of the reaction was so offensive that General Mills, the maker of Cheerios, disabled the comments section on the YouTube video of the commercial. General Mills has announced it will not be pulling the ad due to any controversy.

“The comments that were made in our view were not family-friendly, and that was really the trigger for us, you know, to pull them off,’’ said Camille Gibson, VP marketing for General Mills, on TODAY Monday. More at http://www.today.com/news/cheerios-ad-mixed-race-family-draws-racist-r
esponses-6C10169988

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Viewpoint: The Uproar over the Bi-Racial Cheerios Ad Is Actually Progress

What’s more all-American than Cheerios? How about a wrenching national conversation about race? In recent days a new commercial for the iconic cereal has become a phenomenon – not because it was an especially good ad, but because it featured a black dad, white mom, and their biracial daughter. And on the ad’s YouTube page, anonymous haters spewed so much bile against this image of mixed-race domesticity that the comments section had to be disabled.

The racist comments were far outnumbered by expressions of support, and the ad, which has been viewed over 1.8 million times, garnered 24,000 “thumbs up” to just over 1,500 “thumbs down.” But the intensity and vitriol of the race-baiters got the media’s attention. The subtext of the coverage has been not just outrage but shock: America is supposed to be past this kind of racism – what just happened?

There are three lessons to draw from this fevered moment. The first is that this kind of racism is precisely what happens when a society begins moving past this kind of racism. Had it not been for the election to the presidency of a biracial man who chooses to identify as black, the Cheerios ad would likely not have been as fiercely attacked or defended. But we do have such a man in the White House. We do live in a time when whiteness and white maleness in particular no longer confer automatic primacy. To angry whites who resent the multicolored future for leaving them behind, lashing out at a mixed-race kid who likes Cheerios might seem like an act of defiant political incorrectness – but it’s the epitome of powerlessness.

The second lesson is that pseudocontroversies often matter not for the “news” or “facts” they purport to convey but for their value as community parables and tales of moral instruction. Why did the media turn this tempest in a cereal bowl into a national phenomenon? Not because every household had already been discussing the ad – most of us learned about it only through well-publicized reactions to it – but because this is the kind of thing that (mainly white) news editors and television producers believe that we, as Americans, should collectively disapprove of. And contrived as it all is, this too represents progress.

The deepest lesson is that race is getting too complex for racists, and more complex than even the well-meaning sometimes realize. Bi-racial even seems too simple. Interracial marriages are at an all-time high, and over 9 million people in the 2010 Census identified as multiracial, a 32 percent jump. There are words such Americans use for themselves – Blasian, hapa, mestizo – yet our public language is clumsy and deficient. My daughter is Chinese-Scotch-Irish-Lithuanian-Jewish. She calls herself Asian, with a touch of irony.

Depending on your vantage point, this age of racial flux is either exhilarating or terrifying. The boxes and labels we’ve used to contain race are collapsing. Our inherited and often unspoken notions about America’s fundamental whiteness, about the alienness of brown and yellow people, about the indelible stigma of blackness – all are falling away, their adherents dying off. To be sure, we are not remotely “beyond race” in America. A glance at how power flows in any institution still reminds us: race matters, and darkness disadvantages. But kids like my daughter or the one in the Cheerios ad or the millions celebrating the ad are proof that a more fluid and customizable way of talking about race and cultural identity is going to emerge. Is my daughter Asian or white? Yes. Chinese or Asian? Yes. Lithuanian or Scotch-Irish? Yes. Chinese or Jewish? Yes. American? Yes. Definitely. http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/04/cheerios-ad-takeaway-race-is-now-too-
complex-for-racists/#ixzz2VGh2tOfr

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