The Cheerios Debate: Was it Hate for Race Mixing or Just Plain Old Racism?

First, on the racism that was spewed on the internet in response to a cheerios advertisement which featured a black and white couple and their biracial daughter as casually and normally as commercials have always depicted all white perfect suburban families and more recently all-black and latino ones, I think it's a reminder both that post-racial America is a myth -- there is still racism and the internet and social media, because of their anonymity, has sadly more than demonstrated that - but it's also a reminder to mixed race folks that the racism is anti-black first and foremost, not necessary anti- mixed. And to push this as a potential "mixed race" galvanizing issue -- targeting interracial families is short sighted. In other words, this is not mixed race racism .. It is at end of day, as Jared Sexton calls Antiblackness.

It is not and has never been enough to simply tell the truth about Mixed Race in America and be effective in convincing folks about our struggle as multiracials... This was evidenced not only in the reflective "truth" of the cheerios ad, which came out just on the heels of the news that more Americans now consider themselves multiracial than ever before, but also around the celebration of so-called "Loving Day" which celebrates the interracial marriage of Mildred and Richard Loving.

Loving Day is an annual celebration held on June 12, the anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in sixteen U.S. states.  In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were U.S. state laws banning interracial marriage, mainly forbidding marriage between non-whites and whites. The case was brought by Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, who had been sentenced to a year in prison.  The decision was followed by an increase in interracial marriages in the U.S., although not necessarily all "black/white" ones, and is remembered annually on Loving Day, June 12th.

The Lovings were arrested in Virginia for supposedly having violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored." The Supreme Court's unanimous decision held this prohibition was unconstitutional, overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.  The story is quite complicated and mixed race activists have been trying to find ways to teach this history to everyday Americans.

But is simply telling the truth of this monumental achievement enough to pierce the consciousness of most Americans?   Mixing has been going on so long and it's like-- nothing, not a dent. How can we fit the struggle into a tweet, or a soundbite as they used to say? It is an important question because the message about what this struggle has been about is finally starting to get through... Thanks largely I might add to what Steven F. Riley has done with Mixed Race Studies.org. What I would like to know is what can we do to get more black folk supportive of things like Loving Day because if all of this were about the "truth", then approximately 85% of the African-American population should be supportive of Loving Day, multiracialism, checking both boxes on the census, and half the other things we talk about in this group -- since that is roughly the population of African Anericans mixed with some other race-- hence multiracial. Yet, as we know, many (though not all) African-Anericans largely ignore these kinds of efforts or are unsupportive at best, unless they themselves are first-gen mixed or are in interracial relationships. How do we fit that into a tweet? Because until this movement finds a way to tie itself to blackness in a way that resonates and excites in the larger black community, it will always be at odds with some very long standing and important forces in our society. Yes, better believe it. We need to continue to find creative ways to push this work and sadly, the slippery "truth" as Fanshen Cox called it may not always be completely at the heart of it. And, actually, as Andrew Jolivette has pointed out, epistemologically speaking, it is not incorrect to say that Loving made interracial marriage in the US legal. I think to NOT say it that way also undermines the struggle of the Lovings.