Mixed Race Studies

Why I Can’t Be My Son’s Mother

The Blog
The Huffington Post
2014-02-04

Shannon Shelton Miller

My 6-month-old wouldn’t smile for his stage mom, no matter what faces she made or how much she cooed in his ear. So the photographer asked for my help. I positioned myself next to the camera, directly in my son’s view, then dangled his favorite toy frog above the lens. He burst into laughter and the photographer snapped away, getting the happy baby shots the company wanted for its new product packaging.

We were done. But as my son’s Mom-for-a-Day handed him back to me, I couldn’t help thinking about how much easier it would have been if I had been cast as the mother from the beginning.

My skin was just too dark.

Acting has been a longtime hobby of mine, and I’ve been lucky to land some small jobs for ads ranging from medical equipment to vacuum cleaners. When I took acting classes, my instructors often told me that directors preferred to cast parents with their own kids for family commercials so the emotions would appear more natural. But those teachers weren’t thinking about the glaring exceptions to that rule—the white mother with her cocoa-skinned children, or the African-American mother, like me, with her vanilla baby.

Last spring, a Cheerios commercial featuring a biracial family triggered an eruption of hate speech on the company’s YouTube channel. Consumers didn’t mind, though; supportive comments significantly outnumbered hateful ones, and nearly all agreed that the biracial daughter was adorable. The commercial was a winner for Cheerios, so much so that the cereal giant released a new version that aired on Super Bowl Sunday, continuing to push against a boundary that remains curiously in place in American advertising. It’s the one place where biracial families are still invisible.

Corporations will happily cast a rainbow of Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian and African-American actors for their commercials in the name of diversity, but they’re rarely cast together. I seethed last year when I read one casting call for a major retailer requesting “real” Caucasian and African-American families, and then, in capital letters in the next sentence: “NO MIXED FAMILIES.”…

Read the entire article here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2014 at 02:21Z and is filed under Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.