So tonight I had planned to do a post on bullying as it
seems to be a major thread in the fabric of our lives these days. But since I
don't think that issue is going anywhere anytime soon, it can keep. Tonight I
want to talk about a story I read today that really blew my mind.
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| Gracie from the Cheerios Ad |
Do you remember the Cheerios commercial a few months back where a bi-racial little girl (Gracie) is talking to her mom, who is white, about her dad's claims that Cheerios is good for your heart? While her mom reads the information on the box, Gracie takes it all in and then takes the cereal and uses it to make a heart on her dad's (who is black) chest. Cute right? Well apparently not everyone thought so and got downright angry that General Mills, makers of Cheerios, was featuring a bi-racial family - for real though?
Some of the comments were so mean-spirited that the company had to disable the comments section of the YouTube site where people could view the commercial. Some compared it to racial genocide and called the creators Nazis ... wow.
Today General Mills announced that the family is back,
taking center stage during the Super Bowl. This time daddy is using Cheerios to
explain to Gracie that there will be a new addition to the family. The ad is
super cute and so is the young actress playing Gracie. But more than just being
cute, the fact that General Mills did not allow bigotry to stop them from using
a multi-racial family again gives them great marks in my book
While I am not totally surprised by the level of ignorance
we are still subjected to in 2014, it saddens me that you would let a
commercial about a family and cereal send you over the edge. According to
MSNBC, there were 2.5 million mixed-race
couples in the 1990s - up from 650,000
twenty years before. Do you know what that means? It means almost all of us
knows somebody married to or dating someone of a different race.
As sad as it may be, an uproar like this does serve a
purpose. It serves to remind us that even in a time where we have seen a Black
president, there are still people who live, eat, sleep, drink, and breathe
racism. That is something important for us all to remember. Our kids may think
that because they have friends of all different races or even date kids of other races, that it means all is well
- that they don't need to worry about
race as a barrier. But sadly we do need to worry. They don't show up on your
doorstep in white sheets burning crosses anymore (or not as often anyway)
- they have learned to be more subtle
about it. But trust me, they still scheme to keep minorities from success. They
still read resumes and try to determine from the name who the Black candidates
are to weed them out. They still call a White woman with ambition a go-getter
and the Black woman with the same drive aggressive. And every now and then, they
get worked over something simple, like this commercial, and their true feelings
come bubbling to the surface.
Well, I plan to let my true feelings bubble to the surface
too. And I plan to express them. I am going out and buy a few extra boxes of
Cheerios this weekend.
Check out the Super Bowl Cheerios Ad
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