Yes, in the fine tradition of attacking everything from Teletubbies and Sesame Street to Archie Comics, JC Penny and Oreos, the Bigot Brigade is now taking aim at...
Cheerios.
Below the Doily from Hell, check out the latest Nontroversy® on the outdated bigotry scene:
Cheerios Ad Starring Interracial Family Predictably Summons Bigot Wave
A nice Cheerios advertisement whose only discernible difference from other Cheerios commercials is that it depicts an interracial family was forced to disable its YouTube comments section today after it became inundated with virulent racism.
Despite the hate, Camille Gibson, vice president of marketing for Cheerios, told us in a statement, "Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families and we celebrate them all."
Segregationists still looking to tell the world how angry they are about a cereal commercial can do so at Reddit—"Shoving multi-culturism down our throats when we know it fails.. awesome"—or here, in Kinja.
I guess it's actually kind of refreshing, in a weird sort of way, that this time it isn't homosexuality that's caused them to get the vapors, but a more old school "issue": Interracial Marriage. I guess if nothing else, it's a change of pace; homophobia has kind of gotten stale in recent years; time to come up with something New and Different to be outraged over, even if it's an issue that I thought was put to rest 40+ years ago.
It's sort of like the time in college that someone asked to see my horns, because she was raised to genuinely believe that Jews had them. If nothing else, that was at least a change of pace from the tired "stingy/big nose" stereotypes.
As for the ad itself, it's adorable. Harmless and fairly forgettable, really, but cute.
One of the comments in the Gawker article raised an interesting point--bigots probably wouldn't have had as much of a problem with the ad if the father had been white and the mother had been black. That wouldn't seem quite so "threatening" (think Blazing Saddles' "Where are the white women at?"...)
I swear to God, if these people put 1/10th as much of their time and energy into actually improving the world as they do into fuming xenophobia, we'd wipe out the national debt, stop global warming and cure cancer within a few years.
Update: This is a terrible-quality copy of the clip, but here's a clip from the vastly underrated "Bulworth" that seems apropos:
The key quote:
"All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til we're all the same color."