Okay. So.
I just shared a link on Facebook about the racist backlash from the recent interracial couple commercial that Cheerios just released.
If you haven’t watched the video, it features a mixed girl maybe 4 or 5 asking her white mother if Cheerios are good for your heart, her mom says yes, and it cuts to her black father sleeping on a couch with Cheerios which the daughter has poured all over his chest.
Cute right?
But people are apparently scandalized that this commercial aired on national television even though interracial marriage has been legal for over fifty years and overall preventing people from marrying whomever they want to in general is bigoted, old fashioned and, in my opinion, just plain stupid.
I could rant forever about America having almost possibly reaching its prime some time back and how it seems like we’re making a complete 180˚ and going backwards, but it would take forever and then I’d share it on Facebook and then some friend would comment on it leaving me to wonder why I even have a Facebook in the first place, let alone friends.
What gets me is that my friend commented saying that he agreed with one of the last people who were quoted saying that the black and white couple were not “interracial enough.”
Admittedly this set me off a bit: How in the world can you not be “interracial enough”? If you’re interracial, you’re interracial. Period. And the fact that you’ve overcome the racist and bigoted idea that you can only marry people who are the same color as you is a big deal.
But it is important to note that while in the real world we’re making huge gains, I still think that the media world is still behind. I think the media tends to to cater to old fashioned ideas of what things should ideally be even though there is a noticeable rise in woman empowerment, LGBT empowerment, race empowerment, and so on. As a result, it takes a really long time for things that we accept as the norm to become the media norm.
So when I see a gay couple featured on TV instead of a heterosexual couple, I get excited. When I see a black woman with natural hair featured in a commercial, I get excited. When I see a black and white couple in a commercial, I get excited. Because not even fifty years ago, people could get killed for that. So with the history that America has and the stigma that comes with it, I get excited when I see this stuff on TV, because these are things that are in the process of becoming the media norm.
The couple in the Cheerios commercial is not “not interracial enough,” the media has simply not branched out enough. Yet. There is a lag between reality and our media, and we need to decrease it. We need MORE interracial couples, we need more natural ladies, we need more gay couples, we need more of what’s going on NOW so that we aren’t stuck watching what was going on then.
TJ Digital Creative 