Cheerios ARE really good for the heart

When I think about all of the examples of mixed race identity and interracial families that my daughter has to follow, I get excited. One of the biggest challenges to mixed race identity has consistently been that it doesn’t “mean” anything; that there is no history or community that connects mixed race people. In spring 2013 General Mills aired a Cheerios commercial featuring a mixed race child, an aesthetically white mother, and a black father. While the commercial attracted a good deal of racist back lash, it received even more abundant celebration. The majority of the celebration came from mixed race people and families. For myself and other mixed race scholars, we breathed a sigh of relief, because finally we had proof of the mixed race community we knew existed. Mixed race families and people came out by the tens of thousands to finally be counted as a community. An online project “We are the 15% ” featured a “crowd-sourced collection of portraits of American interracial families and marriages inspired by a Cheerios ad” had mixed race families self-identifying as part of the mixed race community. This project, and other conversations and reactions to the Cheerios back lash, created a space for the United States to visualize what mixed race was and who considered themselves mixed race. Many believed this moment would come out of the 2000 Census when multi-racial individuals would be counted as such. Instead, it was many of the hateful comments about the abnormality of mixed race people and the infrequency of mixed race marriages that caused mixed race people stand up to be visually counted. If you haven't seen this amazing project please check it out and participate. The creators of the website say the follwing about the site: "The title of this project refers to the statistic that 14.6% of new marriages in America are interracial, according to the 2008 Census. This site was created by Michael David Murphy and Alyson West, an interracial family in Atlanta, GA The site can be found at http://wearethe15percent.com/ ... the pictures will make you dance, laugh, and sing... more soon...