My friend Holly Steel pointed me in the direction of the recent furore over an innocuous new Cheerios advert in which a young girl thinks "heart healthy" cereal gives her reason to pour it all over her dad's chest to ensure his longevity. It's fairly funny, and quite a novel way of getting across the message about cardiovascular conditioning.
Everybody likes to see somebody who looks at least a little like themselves, or someone doing the things they also like to do, on TV. It's one of the most popular media that we have access to. Seeing something not totally disimilar from your life depicted on the screen adds that comforting sense of legitimacy to your actions and your being. For me, it means that the TV people thought there was a big enough audience to appreciate it being there in the first place. Because of this, it gives me a sense - contrived or not - that there are other people like me out there.
"So, this is just a stupid commercial about Cheerios but it means a lot to me. It shows interracial families and their children being normal and cute, not something to gawk at or to question. " - Meagan Hatcher-Mays @ Jezebel
It's simple, and most of the time we don't think about it because generally people can clutch at some kind of claim to being represented on TV.
So when I saw the misguided, malicious comments on the advert's youtube comments, it was horrifying. As Buzzfeed sadly professed, "welcome to 2013 America". It was a firm reminder, on a public platform, that Bonilla-Silva's thesis on racism without racists does not negate the existence of some imbeciles who are explicitly, graphically, hard-core racists. Aside from some of the harmful comments about the young actor who played the child that I find actually too obnoxious to chew over right now, there was this recurring theme that the two comments I captured sum up succinctly:
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| By the time I'd heard, Cheerios had blocked comments. Still, sufficient people had enough insipid commentary to comment on mirror videos. The source of these screen caps was this version. |
So this tumult emerged, unquestionably, because two people of apparently different skin tones were in a relationship with one another and had, as many couples do, progeny. The offence caused to the above commenters are demonstrative of a belief in the existence of Whiteness. Across the body of comments, there's a concern that this Cheerios advert harkens to the de-purification of the White race; of the inability to vocalise oneself as a White person in the politically correct polities of the now.
Whiteness is an incredibly powerful symbolic category mobilised to 1) differentiate European imperialists from the inhabitants of the land they came upon, and to 2) homogenise a disparate group of people from different European nations for political expedience.
A lot of sociologists write about the contrived category of Whiteness, and it's as alive as an identifier today as ever it has been. The BNP, the EDL; these people cleave to the idea of being White british, distantiated from everybody who cannot or will not claim to be. Is Whiteness a Fanonian performative prompt? Is it 'a negated signifier' that disavows all "raced" subjectivities and allows the White subject to stand sans race? Regardless of whether one considers themselves to be White, it can't be denied that we all live in a racialised milieu. In other words, to be White is not to be without race. It is when Whiteness is ahistoricised - that is, when we pluck it out of its social and political history and pretend as though there has always been Whiteness - that the damage is done.
Like most sociologists, I see race as a social construct articulated in the materiality of existence. Equally, though, I feel that the problem with saying that is that such a statement evokes a sense that somehow the construct must be inherently erroneous or harmful (Yasmin Gunaratnam brilliantly calls this the 'perverse relationship' between what we might see as the abstraction of social constructionist discourse, and the experiential landscape of day-to-day living.) Quite oppositionally, I view race - like gender, class and whatever various modality of human existence in question - as a politically energetic category that, when mobilised with care and thought, can come to quite fruitful and positive ends. It is in the instances of opprobrium when people invoke race language without the requisite introspection that harm is done. Here is one of so many quotidien examples.
Check out Richard Dyer's White for an Orientalist-style critique of white representation in the arts.
Brett St. Louis offers some really exciting engagement with the idea of race as a productive political category.
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