Cheerios airs commercial with multiracial family. I'm sure you can guess what happens next.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

People are losing their shit to the point where they disabled the comments on Youtube. I can kinda understand people’s anger: Cheerios showed a black man married to a white woman with an adorable daughter. Oh! The scandal! :rolleyes:

Now, I can’t tell how many of the Youtube comments was standard Youtube trolling or how many were genuinely racist, but I would not be surprised at the latter. I mean, last year a bunch of people on Twitter talked about how when Rue died in the Hunger Games they weren’t as sad because she was black and they pictured an “innocent white girl.” In 2005 Cameron Diaz was replaced by Eva Mendez because audiences wouldn’t have liked to see a black man kiss a white woman.

It’s the 2000s. What the hell is wrong with people?

Slightly unrelated: I’m mixed race and I’m tired of people asking “what are you?” I know they’re just curious and between my skin color and hair it’s pretty difficult to peg down my ethnicity, but I’m over it. I don’t want to be rude but I want to answer “I’m American. Does it matter?” My family on my mom’s side has been in this country since the 1880s. My family on my dad’s side since even before then.

2

This irritates me as well. We are ‘supposed’ to be beyond this kind of silliness.
You know what? I am a mixed race person as well. I look ‘white’ (or beige as my friends and I like to joke), but I have ancestry leading back, as far as I can tell, to Wales, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Cherokee and West Africa (probably about where Ghana is now).

And you know what? Almost everyone on this planet has mixed heritage. Imagine if that weren’t true. You’d be living near the Rift Valley and nobody out of your ancestors had ever mated outside of your tribe. For hundreds of thousands of years. Ever. Are there any such people? I think not.

Gosh, I truly wish we could get over this crud. It hurts my heart to see that we, after all the struggles against racial prejudice, are still, even here in the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, having to deal with that kind of horribleness.

But, I am a bit a dreamer.
<sigh>

3

Do yourself a favor and don’t even bother to look at the comments. It’s the worst kind of cesspool.

4

Welp, I didn’t guess. I thought the commercial would involve the white people eating the Cheerios and the black people failing to do so and suffering the consequences.

Nope- turns out the commercial is utterly benign but people are mad. Barking mad.

5

Whoa. Those…what are they called? The ones who hate “anti-whites”–they are something else. It appears that they have a guidebook of some sort, which they probably paid good money for, and it’s titled something like “Responding to Anti-Whites” and consists of three pages.
Page 1. “Say this: ‘Anti-RACIST is anti-WHITE.’”
Page 2. “Also say this: ‘That’s GENOCIDE.’”
Page 3. The End.
It probably has a pronunciation guide. Some of those words are hard, plus they need cues to tell them which words to say really loud.
There’s a guy in town here who promotes this. One guy. I think he had to call the police the last time he picketed, to come save him from all the anti-whites.

6

People actually ask it that way? “What are you?” Even if they are curious, can’t they come up with something more polite?

7

The answer to this is always either: bi-pedal hominid or carboniferous life-form.

8

Sigh.

At least General Mills felt good about putting it on the air. That wouldn’t have happened probably even 10 years ago.

Maybe I’ll buy a box of Cheerios in support. I generally only buy store brand.

9

Yeah, that’s at the far end of the spectrum. Others will say, “If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your ethnicity?”

10

People ask about my children, although usually more politely than the way RandMcnally encounters.
Their dad is Korean/American, I’m white-unto-translucent, and they have a bit of both of us…blondish hair, medium skin (not obviously “Asian” though), and exotic dark eyes. They are more lovely than either of us separately, as is so often the case when opposites attract.

11

Yeah, it’s a shame.

Back in 1974, I was a senior at a boarding school in FL, and in a leadership position of sorts. First day, one of the kids in charge of the 7th graders calls me in, no explanation. I didn’t need one: 4 new kids, one clearly mixed race (black & white), with coffee colored skin and obvious African features. Good looking, strong kid.

The kid who called me in wasn’t racist, but he was clearly worried and reasonably so. The school included a bunch of rednecks, crackers, Latinos, Asians, dopers, jocks, straights, and everything else plus a few you might not guess, with a lot of real blatant racism and any other excuse possible to pour violence on each other, at a level usually just barely low enough to stay off the official radar. (As a freshman, I had been pretty brutally hazed for being a Yankee, among other things.)

But what actually happened surprised me. The kid, named Bowser, was liked by everyone and by the end of that year was a clear leader in his class. I’d be surprised if there weren’t some minor incidents, but none that I ever heard about. It probably helped that he was a decent athelete in a school short on them, and also that he was young enough that he had plenty of seniors who’d rain down on anyone who crossed the line. But mostly I think it was his own character, and (much to my surprise) the mob turned out to deserve more credit than I’d have given them.

To me, the lesson was that while we shouldn’t be shocked when a few act like complete jerks, we also shouldn’t be too shocked when most of the people turn out to do the decent thing. People in general might just not be as bad as we sometimes come to think.

I’m hopeful for the future. Meanwhile, I may ask my procurement department to pick the GM brand rather than the store brand of what’s always been a staple of mine (Cheerios). Just to say “Thanks for standing up.” I hope we do see this commercial on TV, a lot, and if a few jerks stop buying Cheerios because of it, I bet it won’t really affect the bottom line.

12

Here’s another anecdote, from when I should have stepped up but didn’t.

I was at my wife’s college graduation, in our 30’s. One of her aunts was with us, quite a bit older (pushing 70). This was in 1997. In front of us, a white lady sat down with her grandchild, who looked “half-n-half”. Cute kid. (Most mixed-race are to me, am I unusual in that?) Anyway, the aunt, who’s usually a very nice person, says in a very clear voice, “People just shouldn’t do that to their children. Life is hard enough without saddling them with THAT.” The grandmother obviously heard, but ignored it.

I ignored it too. But later, I wish I’d have said, “Yes, and shame on us if we add to their troubles.” My wife would have backed me up on that, too.

13

“You are not Morg. You are not Imorg. What are you?”

Good Gawd, folks! Where will it stop? Where will it lead? If we don’t put a stop to this, that cute little mixed-breed girl could grow to become PRESIDENT! :eek: :rolleyes: And y’all know, we wouldn’t want THAT to happen!

14

Cheerios should expect this kind of backlash. It’s well-known that there is still a lot of negative attitudes about this. No reason to create a needlessly controversial commercial, just focus on the product. (not that I personally have a problem with this; I just don’t have a naive view about how tolerant the rest of society is)

15

A friend who deals with these questions recently shared this: What kind of Asian are you?

16

It’s bull shit.

That said though, I have to wonder if this isn’t a new subtle trick in advertising these guys are trying to go for.

There’s another commercial out there. I can’t remember what it’s for but in thed first scene it shows a mother breast feeding her baby in a restaurant. The gist was, since she was an armature mom she covered the baby up with a blankie.

In the next scene, it shows the same mother with child number two. Since she’s a “professional” now, it shows her breast feeding the baby completely exposed for the whole world to see.

When I saw that commercial, I couldn’t help thinking to myself: “Come on! these guys HAVE to know what they’re doing. pushing hot button topics like that.”

I actually kind of liked that commercial, because in the second scene the mother was telling the waiter “Hey! Eyes up here!” :smiley:

17

awwwwww, too cute. That was a good commercial. Screw the haters

Now I want a bowl of Cheerios.

18

That’s BS. There is a small segment of the population who got their panties in a wad over this, and you think they shouldn’t have done it? There is probably a small section of the population who had their panties in a wad when they redesigned the box. Screw them, I don’t think GM should let those people dictate their ad design or their box design. It was a good move on their part and I applaud it. It will probably increase their brand profile and profits, and that will be because of the controversy. Good on them.

19

On the good news front at least the Count Chocula cereal people now have a good ad idea they can run with.

20

You wouldn’t believe how many times I have had to tell to tell flashlight wielding movie ushers the same thing.