Cheerios Ad Brings Out Racist Trolls
Interracial marriage has been legal for 46 years. But don't tell the haters.
June 1, 2013— -- There's no chance that a new Cheerios ad featuring a biracial family would spark a controversy in 2013, right?
Wrong.
The YouTube comments for the ad had to be disabled this week after a deluge of racist internet users flooded the page with nasty comments. Reddit has curated some of the ugly reaction to the video, but here's a quick summary from AdWeek:
And then you have the YouTube comments section, which predictably has devolved into an endless flame war, with references to Nazis, "troglodytes" and "racial genocide." At what point will an ad like this just seem normal?
If you guessed the answer was a few years after 1967, when the Supreme Court decided that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional, you were wrong.
For its part, the makers of Cheerios are trying to look past the controversy.
"Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families and we celebrate them all," Camille Gibson, vice president of marketing for Cheerios, said in a statement to ABC News.
Tell us what you think: were you surprised at the backlash against the Cheerios ad, or are you not surprised at all?