Commercials depict modern-day families, spew racist comments
It almost seems unreal to think, but racism is inevitable in America no matter how hard we try to avoid it. Some people are still under the impression it is OK to say certain things about a particular race, and that it’s OK to say the predominant race in today’s society is white and should remain so forever.
But according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, by 2050 minorities will be the majority in America, and the number of residents older than 65 will more than double. With this in mind, I’ve seen a lot of discriminatory comments on certain commercials depicting biracial families lately, and this is not all right.
The commercial I’m referring to is a Cheerios advertisement which aired last year depicting an interracial family with a young daughter. When the commercial was uploaded to YouTube, many comments were rude and racist, forcing General Mills to disable the comments box feature, according to today.com.
Coming from a biracial family, commercials depicting interracial families or couples are, to me, the most real and convincing commercials since the minority population is soon to be the majority.
It’s funny, really, how people think it’s OK to make these comments. Any other Cheerios commercial featuring an all-white or all-black — or all-any-other-race family — is less likely to be as widely discriminated, because many people tend to want all races to stay within their own race. But as soon as a similar commercial comes out and the mother is white and the father is black, people have a million and one problems with that.
The Today article cited statistics indicating “…the number or people reporting that they are of two or more races reached nine million during the 2010 U.S. census, a 32 percent increase from 2000 to 2010.”
A similar commercial, which triggered similar reactions as the Cheerios did, was a Swiffer ad featuring a family with a white father who has one arm and a black mother. The couple has two children. The video sparked many comments stressing the same points that interracial families are wrong, which is just outrageous and upsetting.
It has never made sense how people can blatantly make racist remarks such as these. Even here at the University of South Dakota, where college is supposed to be so much more accepting of people, I’ve heard racist remarks — people not accepting the fact that others are of mixed races and those who only want to hang out with their own race. There is definitely a more prevalent single-race population here than one might expect on a college campus, especially at a liberal arts university.
The basic point is that whether or not people want to accept the fact that there is not always going to be predominantly white people in the U.S., times are changing — and for the better.
