General Mills CEO: Doubling down on mixed-race commercial was ‘right thing’ to do

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, United States on 2014-04-24 20:24Z by Steven

General Mills CEO: Doubling down on mixed-race commercial was ‘right thing’ to do

Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal
2014-04-22

Nick Halter, Staff Reporter

General Mills Inc. CEO Ken Powell told a crowd of minority business owners Tuesday that his company didn’t give into racist hate mail when it doubled down on a Cheerios commercial that featured a mixed-race family.

“Doing the right thing ended up being the right thing for the brand,” Powell said, noting that 90 percent of the response to the commercial was supportive.

Powell was speaking about the 2013 Cheerios commercial featuring Gracie, the daughter of a black man and white woman. After nasty online comments and emails, General Mills made a second commercial for this year’s Superbowl that got rave reviews…

Read the entire article here.

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In effect, the Brazilian elite argued that Brazil, unlike the U.S. to which they frequently (and unfavorably) compared it, had no racial problem…

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Excerpts/Quotes on 2014-04-24 17:07Z by Steven

This assimilationist ideology, commonly called “whitening” by the elite after 1890 (Skidmore 1974), had taken hold by the early twentieth century, and continues to be Brazil’s predominant racial ideology today. In effect, the Brazilian elite argued that Brazil, unlike the U.S. to which they frequently (and unfavorably) compared it, had no racial problem: no U.S. phenomena of race hatred (the logical product of the white supremacy doctrine), racial segregation and, most important, racial discrimination. In a word, Brazil had escaped racism. It was on the path to producing a single race through the benign process of miscegenation. The unrestrained libido of the Portuguese, along with his cultural “plasticity,” had produced a fortuitous racial harmony. Brazil, thanks to historical forces of which it had not even been conscious, had been saved from the ugly stain of racism (DaMatta 1987).

Thomas Skidmore, “Fact and Myth: Discovering a Racial Problem in Brazil,” Kellogg Institute (Working Paper #173, April 1992): 6. http://kellogg.nd.edu/publications/workingpapers/WPS/173.pdf.

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