“Is he yours?”
That is what the homeless man asked Kari Mackey six months ago, when she shopped with her baby son in Edgewood.
“He brown and you white.”
Mackey was outraged. “The first thing that came out of my mouth was, ‘I was in labor for 12 hours with him. How dare you question me?’ ” she said. “I told my husband later, and he said I shouldn’t mind what a homeless man said. But for me, it doesn’t matter where it comes from.”
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“When I saw the commercial, my first reaction was utter excitement,” said Mackey, who works in the Carter Center’s Americas Program. “Because I don’t see families that look like us on television.”
“The commercial” is a Cheerios spot titled “Just Checking.”
“Like us” is a black husband, a white wife and bi-racial children.
In the ad, a little girl asks her mother, who is sitting at the breakfast table, if it’s true that Cheerios are good for the heart. The mother says yes, and the girl hurries out of the room, clutching a box of Cheerios. Quick cut to the father napping on the couch. As the camera pulls away, he awakens to find a pile of Cheerios over his heart. Fade out.
At 3 million YouTube views and counting, General Mills is getting a taste of Americans’ fascination with racial line-blurring — a taste with rancid undertones.
Social media went nuts a week ago when the iconic brand began airing the spot. The company shut down the comments section on the commercial’s YouTube page after haters flooded it with references to genocide, racial cleansing, Nazis and troglodytes.
Never mind that 6.9 percent of all married couples in America and 14.2 percent of all cohabiting but unmarried heterosexual couples are of different races. Never mind that the daughter of House Speaker John Boehner married a black man, and the son of Sen. John McCain married a black woman. Never mind the ever-growing list of bi-racial celebrities: Derek Jeter; Halle Berry; Barack Obama.
Families that “just don’t match up” can still register as incongruous, even sinister. So a white Virginia father was stopped after leaving a Walmart and questioned for possibly kidnapping his three young, bi-racial daughters. “They just don’t match up,” were the words recorded in the official complaint.
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Mackey’s husband, Carlton, is the director of the Emory University Ethics & the Arts Initiative. Later this month, his is set to release his latest book, “50 Shades of Black,” a collection of scholarly essays, personal narratives, poems, photographs and paintings that explore how sexuality and skin tone shape how people view themselves and others.
If it accomplished nothing else, the dust-up over the Cheerios ad — in which the company has been widely celebrated as well as damned — told him he’s exploring a subject Americans still care about. “The responses show that it is relevant,” he said.
Carlton met Kari seven years ago in San Francisco, where he was working at a software company. He had just graduated from Tuskegee University in Alabama and had only dated black women.
The West Coast was a whole different world.
“In California, interracial relationships are not just defined as black and white,” Kari said. “A majority of my friends were in what could have considered multiracial relationships, with Filipinos, Koreans, Latinos. Whatever. It was not a big deal.”
When Carlton moved back to Atlanta and Kari would visit him, she noticed the differences.
“Atlanta was so black or white. I didn’t see a lot of different ethnicities or cultures, and I wasn’t very comfortable,” Kari said. “But I think things have changed. I am comfortable now.”
Aside from the query by the homeless man, the couple said, any slights they’ve encountered have been subtle. There was the Waffle House in rural North Carolina, where the place went silent when they walked in holding hands. Or the time in South Georgia, when two older white men practically blocked them from entering a gas station.
In both cases, “we just turned around and walked out,” Carlton said, and that felt empowering.
***
He heard about the bile that had greeted the Cheerios commercial before he saw the ad. So he found it online and watched it. And waited.
Given the nasty backlash it had generated, “I was 100-percent bracing myself” for the spot to indulge in blatant stereotyping or something of the sort, he said.
As soon as he saw the daughter and the mother, he knew the father must be black. So maybe Dad is sitting in front of a television playing video games with a doo rag on? Gold teeth? Broken English?
Nope. It was just Charles Malik Whitfield, who has acted on TV shows including Two and a Half Men, CSI: NY and The Mentalist. Looking more preppie than hip hop.
“When the commercial ended, I was like: ‘Where is the controversy?’ ” Carlton said. “I discovered that the controversy was people feeling that Cheerios was forcing multiculturalism down their throats.
“There has always been a standard portrayal of what a family is,” he said, “whether it was the Cleavers or the Huxtables.”
But here was Cheerios, which is about as mainstream as a brand gets, with this family that just didn’t “match up.” The ad, said Linda Chavers, a Harvard University instructor who studies literature and interracialism, “is visually disruptive to how we imagine race.”
Kari Mackey takes it a step further, suggesting that even though society has become more accepting of bi-racial children, it’s harder for people to feel OK about “the relationship by which they came.”
And that, she said, leaves her “waiting for the day when a commercial like that comes on television and we don’t respond.”
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