![]() Four of these shows still air, with impressive ratings and loyal audiences. There are several dimensions of interracial intimacy reflected in the six successful television shows produced by ShondaLand, Rhimes’s production company. In her world, successful people of color run things and are three-dimensional, sexual beings. The show, currently in its thirteenth season, was groundbreaking primarily because it reflected the lens through which Rhimes, an African American, sees. That was a year before Shonda Rhimes aired her first multiracial hit show, "Grey’s Anatomy," in which residents and surgeons of different colors and sexualities save lives at a fictional Seattle hospital, depend on one another, and have a lot of sex. A five-week content analysis of shows on major networks in 2004 found that 21 percent of shows portrayed an interracial liaison. Others were scandalized. In the South, where miscegenation laws had just been struck down by Loving, NBC executives considered blacking out the kiss but ultimately aired it.īy the 2000s, viewers were experiencing an explosion in portrayals of interracial couples on television. The then small band of Trekkies loved this lurch to a new frontier. So that studio executives would be forced to air the kiss, Shatner purposely crossed his eyes in the tandem, non-kiss version the director shot. Originally, Spock was supposed to kiss Uhura, but the actor William Shatner insisted that he wanted to do it. It was the first time on American TV that a white and black person kissed in prime time. ![]() The Platonians made Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura kiss against their will, and they breathlessly suffered through it. According to the camp script for episode 65 of "Star Trek," sadistic “Platonians,” who modeled themselves on Ancient Greeks, controlled the minds of members of the starship Enterprise. We have traveled far from 1968, when Captain Kirk boldly went where no white man had gone before on television. Viewers can now see many interracial couples in dramas and sitcoms, and this may have contributed to the transformation in public attitudes about such couples. The Cheerios ads and other unambiguous depictions of interracial families are a clear departure from what was standard even five years ago. It is hard to know whether this trend is the beginning of a new normal or a marketing fad. The world they depict - happy, laughing people of different colors and hair textures having a party, raising glasses as they wear cool stuff, inhabit mod furnishings, eat from neon plates - is idealized, but some people are buying it. Or the companies are playing racists like a fiddle, benefiting from the free viral publicity their intercultural ads sometimes create when trolls object. Multiracial families have become de rigueur in advertising for companies that wish to convey that they are open to all customers or to signal hipness to their brand. Nonfragile, emotionally secure people move on. Again, more people laughed and approved than those who choked on hate. Gracie looks at her father and visibly pregnant mother, then advances another Cheerio on the kitchen table to insist, successfully, that this family lineup will also include a puppy. In the commercial, the same father gingerly uses Cheerios to explain to the same moppet, Gracie, that a baby brother is on the way. But before comments were closed, those who clicked an upward thumb to signal their approval of the ad outnumbered those who disliked it by about nineteen to one.Ī year later, General Mills aired an ad during the Super Bowl. General Mills, maker of Cheerios, closed the comment section, and much of the discussion about the controversy focused on the reactionaries. The trolls came out on YouTube, posting nasty comments of “racial genocide” and worse. The commercial ends with a single-word sentence brought to a close with a Cheerio period, “Love.” In a 2013 Cheerios cereal commercial, a biracial girl with a mop of golden curls and adorable fat cheeks asks her white mom innocent questions about the heart healthiness of Cheerios, then takes what she learns and dumps Cheerios on her sleeping black father’s heart. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press. ![]() Excerpted from " Loving: Interracial Intimacy and the Threat to White Supremacy" by Sheryll Cashin (Beacon Press, 2017).
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