Recently, apparently, there's been a kerfuffle (my new word of the moment, I know) about a Cheerios commercial where a little biracial child approaches her white mother about her cereal. Here's the ad from Youtube:
Frankly, I see nothing wrong with the commercial. A child approaches her mom -- who happens to be white -- about her dad eating her cereal, and her mom tells her to check with her dad -- who happens to be black. End of story. What's the problem?
Ironically, there are actually black people upset about this ad just as there are white people angry about it. I would never have thought black people would be angry because races were mixing. In fact, I would have thought they'd welcome the implicit equality that signaled. I guess I was wrong.
We have long been taught that the military was a force that brought civil rights into action. Given the military's emphasis on merit, blacks and other minorities were given opportunities that were enforced through the hierarchy of the military -- with civilian authorities enacting the laws -- that allowed minorities the upward mobility they were denied in the private sector. We've seen African-American admirals, generals, pilots and statesmen rise from the ranks of the military. That is how it should be. That is how it always should have been.
The private sector, with its overreliance on the specious protections of the Constitution for privacy, has hidden in its own ethnic enclaves, keeping minorities out. As a result, stereotypes are allowed to fester. What white person isn't familiar with the image of a black kid, pants slung low over his butt, hair pick in his hair, smoking a cigarette or throwing down gang signs, talking a lingo that is referred to as street, and oogling white women as some sort of trophy? Sure, there are blacks out there like that. But that's not the majority image by any means.
There are plenty of African-American professionals who are every bit the button-down, briefcase carrying, articulate businessman or -woman that whites are. For every straight-laced white guy out there, we have our own countervailing stereotypes: White trash, hillbillies with improper language skills, white supremacists with swastika tattoes. Are all white people like that? Methinks we know the answer to that.
Besides the military, however, I believe a force for changing popular opinions or stereotypes about race has been advertising. More and more, as society itself sees more interracial couples, it's moronic to ignore them in popular media. As with gay couples, interracial couples are a fact of everyday life, and advertising, probably from motives more rooted in profit than altruism, are glomming onto this fact. Why not? If we have couples with older men/younger women, older women/younger men, black men/Asian women, Latino men/African-American women -- why shouldn't all these different pairings be represented, somehow, in culture?
To be sure, there are those who still believe in miscegenation. There is still a handful of people that believe the world is flat, that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone and that 9/11 was a government conspiracy with Zionist elements. But the irrefutable proof is that there are biracial couples that produce biracial children. Can anyone deny that Lenny Kravitz's parents were a black woman and a white man, or that Taye Diggs is married to Idina Menzel, with whom he's had a son? If we're so willing to accept celebrity biracial couplings, why are we squirmy when it comes to seeing biracial couples represented in commercials? Or is it only when the high and mighty, the beautiful and rich, mix races that we're comfortable about it?
I for one applaud Cheerios and whoever the ad agency it was that came out with the ad. There's nothing offensive about it in the slightest unless, of course, we're talking about the people involved in the kerfuffle.
There, I used the word again.
Because the same people who are nonplussed about the ad probably don't know what kerfuffle means.
(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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