It's a heart warming ad for a cereal noted by physicians as "heart healthy." Happy two-parent home and an adorable little girl who loves her mommy and daddy. That's family values personified. The American Dream.
We're all aware by now of the blowback from the Cheerios ad featuring an interracial couple and their daughter. I learned of it when my old newspaper friend Tod posted something about the controversy on facebook. Controversy? The word seems so misplaced in this context. How is it that the most innocuous things can become "controversial issues"?
Really? A mixed race couple controversial? In 2013? Jeez, it's only been a good 150 years since Lincoln released the Emancipation Proclamation. It's a fundamental right -- the idea that individuals of any race who connect with each other and fall in love can legally marry. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this right in its landmark 1967 decision in the case, Loving v. Virginia.
Interesting. A human right that was affirmed by law in the year of the "summer of love" is a "controversial issue" in the age of YouTube. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/03/cheerios-general-mills-commercial-mixed-race-ad/2384587/ http://www.pri.org/stories/after-racist-backlash-cheerios-ad-draws-support-for-interracial-couples.html
This issue has been hanging around for the past week, and it's significant that I'm writing about it on Sunday, the day people in America and throughout the world go to houses of worship.
Fifty years ago -- in 1963 -- Martin Luther King, Jr. called Sunday at 11 a.m. “the most segregated hour in this nation.” http://www.godandculture.com/blog/sunday-at-11-the-most-segregated-hour-in-this-nation http://thinkchristian.net/mlk-and-defying-the-most-segregated-hour There is still, sadly, a measure of truth in that statement, but you know something? I've seen a few miracles in my lifetime.
Nothing like walking on water or turning water into wine, just people coming together. I've seen Hispanic, Asian-American and African-Americans in predominantly white churches. I was in a predominantly black church in downtown Wichita, conducting some business for my job when I started reading the bulletins on the wall because that's what a guy like me does -- reads stuff -- and this affable young lady engaged me in conversation.
"You're welcome to visit here anytime," she told me.
Something supernatural started happening around 50 years ago. A parting of the waters cleared way for a path where everyone was welcome. White Baptist ministers, Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis joined King and the Civil Rights marchers and those images are forever enshrined in evocative black and white photographs. King even became buddies with Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
I've heard such rumblings among my own people. Black people were invented when Noah put a curse on his son Shem. Or maybe it was earlier. When God put a mark on Cain's forehead after killing his brother Abel. There you go, the entire black race was descended from a murderer.
Interracial marriage? How sinful. How contradictory to nature. Even the birds of the air knew to only congregate among their own kind. And the harm to the children? Their skin would be a deformed zebra-like mixture of black and white.
But look at the little girl in that ad. She's a doll. Completely adorable. The kid appears confident and well adjusted as if she's the product of nurturing parents. She looks like the kind of girl who might play with my daughter. This child and her parents look like families within my -- and my wife's --- own extended family.
That's right. Younger people within our families didn't buy into that interracial phobia propagated by the older generations. But then the older people saw these cute, typical kids with their parents --- everyday couples feeling the joy and frustration of living with their children and each other. Not so bad, the old folks decided. I think they forgot about their previous views.
What's happened in our family is a microcosm of
what's happened in America. It's an accepted mainstream view that families may be a mixture of white, black, brown, yellow...whatever. I know conservative evangelicals who are of mixed race families.Interracial family-phobia is a long discredited notion. Who buys into that ancient horse and buggy manure anymore? I hadn't heard anyone dissing interracial marriage in 20 years.
Until recently.
You see, while the majority of Americans have moved on, a loud minority of constipated, christo-facist neanderthals are blocking up America. Some of these philistines even hold keys to power. These days, they're busy beating up safe targets like gays, Muslims, Hispanics...You don't see them bringing out the ol' Jim Crow dogs and crosses until something happens so big that they can't keep it in the closet anymore.
Something like the election of a bi-racial president or the depiction of a bi-racial family in a cereal ad.
By the way, dissent is a beautiful thing in America -- when expressed in a healthy fashion. Criticizing the President does not make one a racist. Bringing up his race in the process of criticizing him is racist. For example, the sign shown below is offensive and racist.
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| "I'm not racist, I hate his white half too." |
There they go again. That's the kind of mentality that blows a gasket over a harmless Cheerios commercial.This -- I don't know -- pseudo-religious, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-political mindset is an imposition laid down by people who preach Family Values. They're all about family values until that family includes, say -- a Catholic mother and Muslim father or two mothers. They place no value in such "non-traditional" families. You don't want those people coaching their daughter's soccer team or serving with PTO at their son's school.
The Hate Crowd will always be around. They were around in the days of segregation and they'll be here in 2030 when we're no longer a predominantly white nation. Racists will not be able to curb the inexorable wave of diverse people coming together for the better, yet my hat's off to the hate mongers. If not for them, I would never have never been aware of this beautiful ad.
I predict this Cheerios ad will become a classic like the Mean Joe Greene Coke ad and Mikey with Life cereal. Pretty ingenious stuff, like something Don Draper and his team would create.
