If you are a couch potato like me, and lately I have been one to my utter detriment, you may have come across an unexceptional commercial for Chex cereal.
Let me set it up for you.
The premise, I think, and I'm happy to be wrong, is that it's a huge deal that somehow, by miracle of all miracles, children and their parents came to an agreement on what children should eat, Chex cereal.
The location: the front steps of some legislative building. Clever that, because, you know, parents and kids are political adversaries.
The time: late morning or early afternoon. Clear blue sky all around.
The action: The kids are coming down the steps to an eagarly waiting news media idiots. The new conference commences with the awestruck journalists posing to the kids the cereal's selling points in a question form: "Did you know that the cereals are made from whole grains? Yet still you like it?" etc... The confused kids reply back, "I don't know, we just like it." It's a yawn inducing display of wholesomeness and America-the-beautiful.
The subtle racism: (I know I'm reading way too much into this, and I wouldn't really say the commercial contain any real hateful bigotry or racism, but I'm just saying it, for the effects, for dramatic purposes.) The cast of kids are very "we are the world;" you have your whites, a black, and even a yellow. I don't think I saw a brown or a red. But anyway, General Mills is trying to be very multicultural; obviously they want to attract and send a positive message of the company to their diverse American consumers. But you know what, it was very poorly executed. It was poor because they played up to stereotypes. What was the deal with the Asian girl holding the rice Chex cereal box? Was it because Asians eat rice as we are known to do? By the way, the white kid was holding a wheat box. You know, since Europeans' main grain staple is wheat. And I think they decided to give the corn box to the black boy, because they couldn't find a Mexican child cute enough. Who know? As I've said, I might be reading too much into nothing, but I really don't like seeing stereotypes perpetuated, however innocuous they may seem.
That is all.
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