My sister, white, is married to a black man, and they’re maybe the fifteenth biracial couple I’ve known. My cousin, black, is married to a white guy, and they’d be #16. Common as dirt around here.
Funny story; my sister and brother in law are both actors. A few years ago they were independently cast in a commercial that involved two “couples.” My broither in law was cast as the husband of the other (also white) actress. The director just didn’t think the real couple had on-screen chemistry.
In UK cities interracial couples are not uncommon. Outside the cities, it’s much less common to see them. Whether the BBC are casting this way deliberately or the writers are trying to be edgy by making the characters this way or they’re just casting people without regard for race (which sounds nice but is unlikely) I dunno. But I personally know several such couples IRL in both the US and UK.
As for US commercials, I always have a sneaking suspicion that the advertisers are hoping for the “Cheerios effect”; i.e. that someone or other will kick up a fuss and the foofarah about the ad will give it an immense amount of extra free exposure and the company will get to make public statements showing how open and tolerant they are and will then make a lot of money because of it. Of course, the more interracial couples appear on television, the less likely it is that that’ll happen.
“It’s not my fault no one can understand the fragmented, incoherent OP I wrote.” Yes, that is one approach to take. Or, you know, you could simply explain more clearly what you were trying to say in the first place.
Except when they are required to depict someone negatively, like the burglar in ADT commercials. Today, there’s absolutely no way that it can be anything other than the whitest white man they can possibly find.
This is a very different “Cheerios effect” than the one I am familiar with. Could you elaborate on why you use that name for the effect you are talking about?
In fact, I’ll try to parse the whole thing. I think he’s saying:
*Some years ago, a TV commercial showed an interracial couple. This was controversial at the time, but these days it’s very common to see them on TV. However I hardly ever see them in real life. My golf buddy and me are about the only ones I can think of. *
OP, let us know if this is a correct interpretation or not.
Lamar Mundane, you’re lucky that Peter Morris got here before I did, to explain your not-at-all clear OP, which you yourself had no interest in clarifying. I’ll leave this open, but everyone else, let’s cut the discussion of what the OP meant, now that it’s finally cleared up.
Now that the meaning of the thread has been clarified, I think, I will say this: The OP must not live in California if he doesn’t see interracial couples often. Here in the Bay Area they are very common, at least if you’re taking white/Hispanic or white/Asian, and white/black couples aren’t rare.
At one place I worked we noticed that every one of us white engineers had married an Asian woman.
