{"id":33596,"date":"2013-09-13T20:41:34","date_gmt":"2013-09-13T20:41:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=33596"},"modified":"2013-09-13T20:41:57","modified_gmt":"2013-09-13T20:41:57","slug":"will-interracial-relationships-ever-be-common-on-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=33596","title":{"rendered":"Will Interracial Relationships Ever Be Common on TV?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will Interracial Relationships Ever Be Common on TV?<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bitch Magazine<\/a>
\n2013-09-04<\/p>\n

Sophia Seawell<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m usually skeptical of advertising. I know companies spend millions of dollars hoping that their body lotion or paper towels or lunch meat will bring me to tears.<\/p>\n

But ads are<\/em> powerful. They\u2019re a form of media where we see representations of ourselves and our society, just like on TV shows they interrupt. And it\u2019s rare to see people like me\u2014with a black father and a white mother\u2014represented in ads.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, like many other people, I heard about a Cheerios ad, “Just Checking<\/a>,” that featured an interracial family\u2014a white mother, black father and their daughter\u2014before I saw it. I was excited about it, sure, but why I was excited didn\u2019t really register until I finally did see it for myself…<\/p>\n

…The Cheerios ad caused stirred up some racist controversy, leaving many people wondering why interracial relationships still have the ability to alarm 46 years after the Supreme Court struck down laws that banned interracial marriages in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia<\/a><\/em> case. Clearly the idea that interracial relationships are not okay runs deeper than we\u2019d like to think.<\/p>\n

A half-century isn\u2019t enough time to dissolve the well-engrained ideas about race and marriage that were constructed after the Civil War, when miscegenation<\/a> laws spread across the country \u201cto serve as props for the racial system of slavery, as one more way to distinguish free Whites from slaves,\u201d\u00a0 as historian Peggy Pascoe<\/a> puts it. The idea that mixing of races was unnatural, against God\u2019s will, and would lead to biological degradation made miscegenation laws a tool to define what a legitimate family was and thereby maintain white supremacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the time of the Loving v. Virginia<\/em> decision, seventeen states still had miscegenation laws in place. In fact, it took Alabama until 2000 to officially amend their law. Even more recently, in 2009, a judge in Louisiana refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of interracial marriage reached all-time high in 2010. In that year, about 15 percent of all new marriages were interracial and 8.4 percent of all existing marriages were interracial.<\/p>\n

But films, TV, and advertising haven\u2019t caught up to the current racial reality…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will Interracial Relationships Ever Be Common on TV? Bitch Magazine 2013-09-04 Sophia Seawell I\u2019m usually skeptical of advertising. I know companies spend millions of dollars hoping that their body lotion or paper towels or lunch meat will bring me to tears. But ads are powerful. They\u2019re a form of media where we see representations of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8413,8,394,20],"tags":[2537,15757],"class_list":["post-33596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-bitch-magazine","tag-sophia-seawell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}