Have you seen the new Cheerios spot? The one with the adorable little girl who is part of an interracial family? The spot drew the attention of YouTube racists who flooded the YouTube channel with comments not in step with most of the country.
Americans like the ad. In fact, according to data from Ace Metrix, “Good for Your Heart” (called “Just Checking” on YouTube) tested the highest of six new Cheerios ads this year and garnered attention and likeability scores 9% and 11% “above the current 90-day norm for cereals.” The ad, created by Saatchi & Saatchi, ”appealed to all age/gender demographics with the exception of males over 50.” Don’t worry, that’s not a racism issue. It seems that ads with babies tend to perform poorly with this demographic regardless of the race of the child.
In fact, if you look on the YouTube channel now, there have been 46,172 like the ad, while only 2,171 disliked it.
Camille Gibson, vice president of marketing for Cheerios, told Gawker.com, “Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families and we celebrate them all.”
And let’s face it, General Mills is not trying to make a societal statement. They are just reflecting the diversity of America. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. households that included interracial or “interethnic opposite-sex married couples” grew by 28 percent between 2000 and 2010 and now stand at 10 percent of all married couples. Among infants younger than 1, there are 17 mixed-race children for every 100 infants whose parents said they are black alone. A decade ago, there were nine.
More than half of US babies born last year were non-white.
And while we are still trying to figure if we are black or white, or both, white is a diminishing color. Yes, we have crossed the tipping point. The Census Bureau says that for the first time, most babies born in the U.S last year were non-white. Among young people today, diversity is so prevalent that one hopes that racism will quietly recede. Minorities increased 1.9 per cent to 114.1 million, or 36.6 per cent of the total U.S. population, lifted by prior waves of immigration that brought in young families and boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years. The growth in the US has stalled some during the recession, but we can certainly look forward to a day when the minorities become majorities in the US.
