On Tuesday, the ad team at Cheerios posted a new commercial entitled, “Just Checking” to YouTube that featured an adorable little girl asking her mother if it’s true that Cheerios are good for your heart. The mother reads to her from the box that Cheerios are indeed “Heart Healthy” and the little girl is happy because she just poured a box of the cereal all over her dad’s chest as he was napping on the couch. It’s a sweet Cheerios commercial that gets a point across while perhaps making people smile. So naturally, it inspired YouTube trolls to spew racial hate.
You see, in this commercial, the mother is white and the father is black, and that didn’t sit too well with the legions of anonymous bottom-feeders that believe that posting hateful messages on YouTube qualifies as a life. Fortunately, Cheerios disabled the comments on the video, so I couldn’t even see some of the worst comments. But Ad Week described it as such:
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.”
Ad Week also points out that the video made the front page of Reddit, and Business Insider reported that “it received a plethora of racists remarks” there as well. I read some of the 900+ comments on that thread, and while I saw plenty of tongue-in-cheek racist jokes – “should be for multi-grain Cheerios” – and something about Stone Cold Steve Austin and a dolphin that made me chuckle, I thought most people involved in that thread were more concerned with the corporate infiltration of the Valhalla known as Reddit’s front page.
Maybe the “racist remarks” were just misconstrued, like this one that I think is directed at an ad making it to Reddit’s front page:
Nice try Cheerios ad team! I’m never eating Cheerios again! Good day sir!!!
Either way, YouTube just needs to eliminate comments on all videos, so all of the racist cowards can redirect their energy back to loathing their own worthless existences.
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where da white women at?
but seriously that commercial is cute, people just need to chill out.
Holy shit dude, you read my mind like 3 days in advance!
At first I read that as “CHEETOS are indeed heart-healthy” and immediately felt better about all the cheetos I’ve eaten over the years. Then I realized it’s Cheerios and realized that made way more sense. True story.
If Cheetos were heart healthy I’d be winning marathons.
I just realized I said “realize” twice in a sentence. I should proofread more.
I just realized that you just realized that you said realize twice in a sentence. Is this the snow dream level?
BRAAAAAAAHHHMMMM
Sometimes I don’t want to live on this planet anymore…then I come here and most of the commenters restore my faith in the interwebs
Uproxx commenters are fine, upstanding members of the internet…unlike 99.9% of their YouTube counterparts.
Except when we get the occasional influx of mouth breathers every time something political appears on Uproxx.
… or when I have a comment …
You guys didn’t like the POFLAWA influx? I thought that was hilarious!
Hey, I breathe like this because of a deviated septum!
I like the commercial! People need to relax, because bi-racial families are still apart of the Human race, like we all are!
but I came here to read the highlights of that comment thread. This is bullshit bait and switch. Also, the multigrain comment was money.
The commercial is smooth shit there’s beauty in us all damn the commercial brings love n there’s still hate shit crazy man
Really cute ad, there will always be bigots, but banning comments is not the answer. Because I can guarantee that good will prevail
I told you guys not to give the internet to south and midwest.
This is your own damn fault.
As a proud southerner I must agree with you. There’s some backward ass thinkers around here.
And as a midwesterner (I don’t know what the fuck we call ourselves), I see way too many people just in my FB newsfeed that needs their internets taken away…
I have to agree, though when telling someone what region of the U.S. I hail from, I tell them the Great Lakes Region because when I hear Midwest I even think of some random guy holding a “God Hates Fags” sign.
So, the South and Midwest is bad because they stereotype others but stereotyping these regions is ok? Got it.
@evilbanker: That’s Commandment #3 on the Uproxx Manifesto, after (1) Thou shalt love all things Arrested Development and (2) The Daily Show is thy God; thou shalt have no other Gods before Stewart.
As one who grew up in the midwest and now lives in America’s Wang after stints in the ignorant northeast and the dusty southwest, I resent this stereotyping. There’s less bigotry in Texas than in Massachusetts.
True story: My mom is from Texas, and my dad is from Vermont. My mom is Scots-Irish, and my dad is German-English. I am as white as it gets; my grandmother’s family literally came over here on the Mayflower.
I was in high school, at a driver’s ed class in Tennessee where my mother lived and where I visited every summer, surrounded by other college track white kids, the sons and daughters of educated people with nice houses in the suburbs. I mentioned that my dad was from the North and a girl behind me said “So you’re a half-breed?”
I’ll cheerfully agree there are racist idiots in the North, and plenty of perfectly pleasant and non-racist people in the South. But, dude, THERE’S A PROBLEM.
Also, I’m pretty sure if it weren’t for the Halo Effect, America would have burned itself to the ground somewhere in the 1940s.
Can we put together the money for a “Ban Youtube Comments” super-PAC?
Sometimes I wish my home planet needed me, so I could just fly away from here. People really suck sometimes.
I’ve decided that if I ever make it big as a showrunner or filmmaker, I’m gonna make every romance between a white woman and a black man. That shit makes people really uncomfortable and trolling bigots on a mass scale tickles my fancy.
The commercial was super cute. Idk man give people anonymity and they go ape shit. I would bet that half the racist comments were just thirteen year old kids thinking its funny for shock value and the other half was Fox News crazies.
Doesn’t the mom look like Megan Draper Jr.? Imagine Don at the wedding, asking the groom for another drink, and the groom kicking his ass.
Bigots still exist? I thought racism was eliminated worldwide when “We Are the World” came out.
Not sure if trolling or stupid …
Then I’m positive you’re stupid
They definitely had a white guy do the voice over at the end, though.
Sucks that a product actually has a decent commercial–and depicts real-looking people doing real-looking things–and the morons shit all over it.
Guess that’s why Nazi-os are so popular, eh?
To everyone suggesting that youtube comments be banned, just stop it. The internet has brought this hate filled people to the forefront, exactly where they need to be. I would rather endure their hateful venom than to lulled into a false sense of calm by pushing their racism and bigotry back underground.
For everyone of you misinformed ignorant lot that thought racism was dead or dying just because Obama was elected, you need this wake up call.
but for reals…i completely agree. wanting youtube to ban comments just because of the jackasses is not the way to go. i do think that racism is SLOWLY dying, though. we are much farther ahead today then we were 40 years ago, much less 80 or 100 years ago. i also just have to throw out that the likes of jesse jackson and al sharpton, not to mention spike lee aren’t helping matters. they love stirring up racism just as much as those youtube commentors do.
Well said Marcus. If you think YouTube comments are the last place racism exists then your worldview is much too sheltered. We, as people, have made a lot of progress over the years in terms of the tolerance and acceptance of others. However, deleting and removing viewpoints that we don’t think are acceptable does not advance this. It’s essentially hiding your heard in the sand.
I do have to agree. Everyone has the right to speak and we’re under no obligation to listen, just an obligation to let them speak.
And to find their Facebook accounts and post “We Are The World” videos.
haha. troglodytes
I’m uncomfortable that they had the white woman sitting down. Its racist to not show if she had a big butt.
This article this more Mulatto Butts.
Interracial love makes beautiful babies- for reals.
What an adorable commercial. Plus, the casting makes perfect sense. The mom is white, dad is black and the little girl looks mixed. They thought this shit through!
As for Youtube comments, I don’t know that they all should be banned. I just think advertisers should turn them off pretty much always. Really you should only turn them on if you aren’t afraid of stupid feedback mixing in with feedback you actually want. Almost none of that feedback is going to be useful to advertisers.
FUCK EVERYONE WHO APPROVES OF THE MIXING OF “HONEY” AND “NUT”
I thought the commercial was cute. You know, I have yet to see a single commercial where a black man was with a woman who was darker than him (and I’d be interested to see if anyone can point me towards one). Even when they pair him up with a black woman she is invariably lighter or mixed, as are whatever kids they give them. I wonder if the vitriol would have been as intense had they paired a white man with a black woman, or an Asian man with an white woman. Black men and white women are a commonplace interracial pairing yet people are still surprised (in some cases dismissive) when they see Fassbender with a black chick. Where da black womens at?
From a purely cynical perspective, this is actually a genius move on the part of Cheerios.
Surely they knew a few idiots would freak out, and they knew normal people would then freak out at the idiots. And of course they were 100% positive the media would cover any sort of racial imbroglio.
Result: their commercial is all over the place. They exploited our nation’s racial neuroses for profit. Amoral but brilliant.
There was an ad campaign – I think for Verizon – a few years ago that featured a really dorky white guy dad, who had three mixed-race African-American/white kids, including an adorable 5 year old.
What if it was two guys and it was a commercial for Fruit Loops?
ASIA FOR THE ASIANS, AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR EVERYBODY!
Everybody says there is this RACE problem. Everybody says this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.
The Netherlands and Belgium are just as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them.
Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for EVERY white country and ONLY white countries to “assimilate,” i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites.
What if I said there was this RACE problem and this RACE problem would be solved only if hundreds of millions of non-blacks were brought into EVERY black country and ONLY into black countries?
How long would it take anyone to realize I’m not talking about a RACE problem. I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?
And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn’t object to this?
But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.
They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.
Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.
Actually, a lot of people are saying Japan is going to have to integrate and deal with it. Japan will require a larger and larger immigrant labor force as time goes on. Short of Italy, it’s going to have one of the worst worker-to-retiree ratios in the First World, and while robots might be able to fill some of the gap, the simple truth is that the Japanese are just going to have to let in more immigrants, a lot more. The same will likely be true of China and Taiwan.
But thanks for playing.
“AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS”
Which ones? The white ones, the black ones, or the Arabian ones?
@Brig: Aren’t there a bunch of East Asians in places like Uganda too?
But you raise a good point. Remember in 2004, when we had an actual born-in-Africa African-American first lady candidate with Teresa Heinz, and black people were saying she couldn’t be called African-American?
Africa for the Africans, Asia for the Asians, white countries for EVERYBODY!
It is GENOCIDE.
“so all of the racist cowards can redirect their energy back to loathing their own worthless existences.”
Exactly. Racists are worthless, self-loathing cowards. You ignorant trailer-trash racists can “preserve” your white race by screwing your cousins. We know that you already do.
I’m white, my wife is South Korean and our daughter is gorgeous.
Completely unrelated: [www.theonion.com]
I am a Black woman that lives in Alabama, I have dated a few different races in my life , all my nieces and nephews are bi racial.. Racism is still out there and it is still very stupid..
Its a propaganda message not an advertisement:
Nobody argues that Asia is not for Asians or that Africa is for Africans. Why then do anti-whites argue that White countries are NOT for White people?
What we have is: White countries flooded by non-whites.Whites are told be TOLERANT.Whites are forced to integrate.With assimilation we see the extinction of the White race.
Its about White genocide.
“Genocide involves the attempt to achieve the disappearance of a group by whatever means. It does not have to be violent, it could be a combination of policies that would lead to a certain group dying out.” Fraser-PM Australia ‘75-83.
In what world is America a white nation? There were these brown people that some people call Indians all over this country before we (that’s we as in white people, not we as in Americans) killed large portions of them and banished the rest of them all to tiny patches of land that we (white people) didn’t want because those places were inhospitable.
You really need to take a good long look at your worldview, and rethink some of the decisions you’ve made.
I’m really not surprised that this guy signed up for an account just to spew two comments worth of idiocy at us.
A lot of anti-white hate here. We need to work on that. Anti-racist is a codeword for anti-white.
By that logic all white people are racist. Why do you hate white people so much, George? Did white people touch you in the no-nos?
I wish people would get this mad about the fucking Animal Planet disaster about the fucking Mermaids.
They always show a white woman and a black man, they don,t have the balls to put a White man and a coal black woman and a mixed kid. its like they are trying to pimp out white women, try it the other way and see what happens.