Kids react to the Cheerios commercial


Do you recall the Cheerios commercial I wrote about last month that featured a mixed-race couple and their child and that sparked so much anger when it was shown on YouTube that the comments had to be shut down? Well, the show Kids React showed the commercial to their child panelists to get their reaction. It is well worth watching.

I think that the little girl in the blue top should run for president some day.

As an added bonus, these young children even use that much abused word ‘literally’ correctly!

Comments

  1. says

    I watched it a second time on mute to read the popup comments and noticed that all the girls have one background with hearts and flowers and pinky-purple paint and the boys have a blue background with a cork board with yellow & moustache pins. How about that gender norm reinforcement?

  2. davidbrown says

    Two of my children are of mixed ethnicity (I don’t use the word ‘race’ because I find it stupid), Caucasian and Chinese. They learned about racial prejudice from watching old episodes of ‘Kung Fu’ with me. They had a very difficult time understanding why there was so much animosity towards the David Carradine character. They would react to this commercial in exactly the same way these wonderful children do.
    I am endlessly pleased to be living in a place where my children have to learn about prejudice from a 1970s TV program rather than first-hand.

  3. Mano Singham says

    That is a good catch. I noticed the different backgrounds but did not pick on the pattern. I wonder why they did that?

  4. embertine says

    Ha, I love that the kids are genuinely baffled as to what the “problem” is. Although it’s noticeable that the little black girl with the quiet voice is less surprised than the white kids.

    Also, I have only just seen the commercial and didn’t realise the dad was Charles Malik Whitfield. SQUEEEEE!! I wouldn’t mind making a mixed-race family with him, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN AND I THINK YOU DO.

  5. Mano Singham says

    Yes, that was what amused me the most too, the reaction of “What the hell? This is just a Cheerios commercial, so what’s the problem?”

    I had no idea who Whitfield was, though he did look vaguely familiar.

  6. Penny Abrams says

    I wept. With joy. With renewed hope. I am an 83 yo woman who has seen it all…from segregated schools to legal gay marriage…to the Zimmerman trial…always with bigotry somewhere in the mix. To see and hear these beautiful babies is so heartening I can only hope this is not a ‘special’ school where they are inordinately bright from extraordinary families and that it is the genuine trend in our nation. Just as I was beginning to think I’ve lived too long, these beacons of light for the future have given me more energy. God bless them.

  7. Mano Singham says

    I don’t think they are a specially selected group. I work on a daily basis with young people (college students, not young children) and find that they are far more tolerant and accepting and devoid of bigotry than our generation. This is what gives me hope for the future.

  8. Acolyte of Sagan says

    This reminds me of an incident when my eldest daughter was about eight. We lived in a village with a small school of around 100 pupils. One day my daughter asked if Sophie could come for tea after school, so I said I’d ask her mum or dad when I saw them at school, and asked which kid Sophie was. She took ages trying to describe her; tall, pretty, long hair, really pretty eyes, good at maths, yadda, yadda, but it wasn’t until she said -- with much exasperation -- “Oh, you do know her, Dad, you helped her dad mend his car outside school at Christmas”.
    She was talking about one of the only two black kids in the school.

  9. DonDueed says

    Steven Colbert has a running gag in which he claims he “doesn’t see race”. It’s funny for most of us because we can’t imagine anyone not noticing the race of the person they’re dealing with.

    The children in this video (along with Acolyte’s daughter) would not get the joke.

    Like the other commenters here, I too draw renewed hope for the future. I never thought it would happen in this country with its horrific legacy of racial prejudice, but now it may be we’re really turning a corner.

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