What’s controversial about the Cheerios commercial featuring a biracial family is not the fact that the parents are of different races…
The above Cheerios advertisement is actually exactly like every other cereal advertisement on television.
It features a pretty-enough mom and an adorable round-cheeked child, playing out a moment in the lives of a perfect TV family. Mom reads at the kitchen table while Dad takes a well-deserved nap on the couch. Their precocious little girl makes a mess in a adorable way.
Nothing new here, folks. Nothing to see. Move along.
Wait, except Dad is Black and mom is white.
And their adorable, precocious child is—of course—biracial.
The thing is, this ad is still not controversial. The majority of Americans don’t find biracial families controversial anymore. In case anyone wasn’t paying attention, we have a biracial President of the United States.
The big deal about this ad is that a whole slew of racists took an opportunity to enjoy the Internet’s anonymity and say ignorant things in the notoriously horrific YouTube comments section.
But we don’t need to add to this stupidity by calling the ad controversial. Because it’s not. This ad features a perfect American family, just like every other commercial on television. A family just like so many we all know. Like two of my best friends’ families. Like many of the families of the kids my children go to school with. Like the family our President grew up in.
Certainly my friends who are in biracial families have faced racism. And we need to keep talking about the racism that people experience every day, and find ways to combat it.
But the controversy of this commercial is not the races of the parents portrayed. The controversy is that we care enough about what a few anonymous racist assholes think that we’re willing to call a perfectly normal Cheerios commercial “controversial”.
Somehow I suspect that these racist ranters would not have been nearly as outraged had the ad featured a black mom and a white dad.
It sure would be curious to see the response. No doubt a lot of history there – the fear of the Black man, the idea of women as property…
Good observation.
What is controversial is the claim that this sugary slime of a food is a good way to lower cholesterol and is thus targeted at black men, who are statistically higher at risk, via the “love” of a child.
Thank you!!! Well said!
Everyone is a tough guy behind the veil of the internet. Unfortunately though it still shows a dark side in humanity that we have not jumped the hurdle of racism.
I have no way of knowing how many racist sentiments were presented because of this commercial. I don’t know what the threshold is for a company as large as General Foods before they believe the sentiments are a significant representation of the population. What I do know is just because we have a biracial president doesn’t mean that a significant percentage of the population doesn’t disapprove . Furthermore, not everyone accepts the POTUS as a biracial man. I also know that racism manifest institutionally and otherwise in ways that are violent and criminal. Racism has now and has always had… Read more »
With Twitter storms and stuff going viral today, I wonder what we even count as “controversial” anymore. Does that word even have the same meaning anymore when it comes to online comments? There ought to be a minimum number and minimum percentage of obnoxious comments before we count something as controversial. You’ll get rabidly racist comments on Twitter by showing an ad with nothing but a puppy in it. At least a full percentage point will be messages sent to the wrong address anyway. Don’t let small numbers of obnoxious anonymous online people get more influence than they should.
I agree. It should not be controversial. Some people are trolls just to be trolls. (Don’t know anyone like that myself…. : – ) )
I do sort of expect some hand-wringing on this site about how the dad is just sleeping on the couch and the mom is in the kitchen doing the childraising and how dare Cheerios perpetuate the stereotype of men as lazy, checked out fathers, etc., etc.