This is a parody of a Cheerios video that went viral a few weeks ago.

Cheerios posted an advertisement with a biracial family and within hours had to shut down the comments section on YouTube because there were so many vile, hate-filled, racist comments.

Here’s the parody that steps it up a notch with a gay, biracial family. Here’s to my gay friends. Let’s raise our flag high and keep on shutting down the haters!

Read my post on the Just Checking Cheerios video.

I stumbled upon this video of the Jackson boys on the Carol Burnett Show. It is priceless, especially if you happen to be fans of both (which I am). It’s kind of long so if you get antsy, skip to the end and see some classic Carol Burnett jamming out to ABC:

Not a danger to society.

Finally, 16 months after his murder, the trial for Trayvon Martin begins. Jury selection for the George Zimmerman murder trial started yesterday. I will be watching this case closely to see if justice will prevail and a precedent will be set for all those who think that an unarmed black male walking in your neighborhood is cause for alarm.

Key points of George Zimmerman Murder Trial:

• Trayvon Martin was murdered on Feb. 26, 2012 as he walked from the store to buy an iced tea and bag of Skittles when Zimmerman profiled him as a suspicious character. Martin was shot in an ensuring scuffle. Details of their interaction are not entirely clear. Zimmerman says he shot Martin in self defense. But many have argued that he chased down Martin and Martin was the one fighting for his life.
• If convicted, George Zimmerman faces life imprisonment.
• George Zimmerman pleaded not guilty, claiming self defense.
• This case hold the potential for a defining moment in civil rights.
• George Zimmerman wasn’t arrested until 44 days after the killing, citing the Stand Your Ground law in Florida.
• Zimmerman was finally arrested after an outcry from the nation’s top civil rights leaders and American citizens demanded that this was not a case for the controversial Stand Your Ground law.
• The 911 call will be debated, there is still no determination on whether it was Martin or Zimmerman screaming for help.
• Jurors will remain anonymous.
• George Zimmerman waived his right to a “stand your ground” pretrial immunity hearing. If he had had this hearing, a judge could have ruled that his actions were legal and no civil or criminal hearing would have continued. Instead of doing this, Zimmerman chose to use a self defense claim.
• This is the second day of jury selection, which is speculated to last about three weeks.

When I first saw it on another mom blog’s page, I was overjoyed. What an adorable ad. It was perfectly understated. Just two parents hanging out with their kid. I am seriously going to go buy some Cheerios even though we rarely eat cereal. They were actually my favorites growing up anyway. Annika has never liked cereal, but it’s been long enough. It will probably become her new obsession. The only thing about the commercial that I thought was unbelievable was the fact that the mom was quietly sitting at the kitchen table reading while the dad was taking a nap.

But anyway, it didn’t take long for my bubble to get popped when I started seeing articles about how this ad brought out the racists. I hadn’t bothered to read any comments when I initially viewed this ad, so I didn’t get to see them. I never read comments unless it’s late and I’m severely bored. Apparently, according to various articles, the racist comments got so bad, they were closed. I saw a few on some of the other articles. They made me a little sick.

It was just another reminder that there are people in the world who view me and my daughter with quiet hatred every time we go out in public. Just when I start to become complacent, out it comes.

For the most part, I figure it doesn’t matter to me. There is hate all over the world. But it worries me, how people view Annika. I worry about how she will manage as she ages and how the racism will affect her self esteem. Or how it might affect her in situation where she might stick out just a little more than a white kid.

You can read more about this on these articles from Slate, Reddit, Gawker, I love this one in particular, an editorial on Jezebel.

Lily on My Big Big Friend

Annika has been saying things this past year about her skin. Negative things. Mostly she says she wishes she was white and had “hair that falls down” (straight hair).

Every time, it pains me. I grew up wishing I was taller; had better hair; or bigger/smaller boobs (depending on my phase of life), etc. etc. But disliking the color of my skin never entered into the picture. You can change your hair color and texture (temporarily), lose weight, and adjust clothing to make yourself bigger or smaller, so when you’re young and experimenting with your looks, one can achieve temporary perfection occasionally (very temporary). I’ve tried lots of different looks over the years.

But you can’t change your skin color. No matter what Michael Jackson tried to convince us that was true, it just isn’t. The only thing you can do is learn to love it.

I have no idea how to teach Annika to love her skin color other than to love it and hope she mimics me. So, what I’ve been doing is inserting comments about beautiful brown skin. Showing her images of beautiful brown people and pointing them out when we see them in real life. Talking about beautiful brown skin.

I’ve never really mentioned my own skin much, except in comparison to hers. But the other day, I was putting on sun block and Annika asked me why I was putting it on. Without thinking, I said something like, “Well, I really don’t want my skin to get tanned.”

“Why mama? Don’t you want to have brown skin?”

Whoa. That stopped me in my tracks. I suddenly had this realization that while I was telling her all the time how pretty brown skin is, I rarely mentioned mine on its own. And I had never explained that while I think brown skin is pretty, I wasn’t necessarily wishing for my own (brown skin).

So I said to her, “I think brown skin is beautiful. But I’m not brown. I’m white. And I think I look pretty with white skin. We’re all beautiful the way we’re born.”

She seemed to like that and went about her business of watching one of her current favorite television shows, “My Big Big Friend.”

I couldn’t believe it. Segue to my recent post on brown skinned role models on cartoons for kids. Staring me right in the face was Lily, a beautiful black child with glasses and a bossy attitude.

I’m not crazy about her personality, but overall the show is cute and the kids are nice to each other. So I’ll take it.

Add another to my list of brown skinned girls in cartoons.

It was thoroughly enjoyable and very casual. The interviewer, a white mother of a biracial son, is writing her dissertation and might eventually produce a documentary on the topic.

Her research is strictly on white mothers of biracial children and their interactions with people at school. The interview was very casual, conducted over Skype and we essentially just talked for about 90 minutes. (I think it was only supposed to last an hour.)

We talked mostly about our various interactions with the general public and our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about race and skin color, and how those have changed (or not) since having our children.

Our feelings on many of the topics were similar. There were plenty of “YEAH! I KNOW, RIGHT?!” moments, which was awesome. Even when you have friends who are biracial moms, these conversations still don’t happen very often because we’re all parents who have busy lives and when we get together we don’t all sit around talking about our kids’ skin colors. So it was fun.

One of the points she made during the interview that I absolutely loved was how it’s so important for white parents to talk to their white children about race, skin color, and racism. I thought I knew all the reasons it was important but she brought up something I’d honestly never even thought about.

There is a whole new generation of white kids out there who will grow up to fall in love with a person of color. We did. And yet, it’s not something that parents necessarily think to talk to their kids about.

There’s lots more on that topic, but I’ll let you save it for a conversation with her. Or the possible documentary. Just something to think about.

Jennifer Chandler is doing this study for Cardinal Stritch University and is looking for more participants. If you wish to participate, contact her directly at: jlchandler@wolfmail.stritch.edu

Jinkies! What’s up Daph?

After my bitch and moan session in last week’s blog post, I figured y’all deserved to see the evidence.

Here we are, all geared up as Daphne and Velma. Fyi, the Daphne costume came from eBay, and the only thing Annika really liked about it was the wig. She LOVES this wig. I think it’s because she can flip her hair around and feel it on her shoulders. Who doesn’t love that?

The rest of the costume was not accurate enough. The dress is all wrong. And it came with boots! “Mom, Daphne doesn’t wear boots. She wears high heels!” Or, in this case, tennis shoes that light up when you walk. I think they look better than the boots, too, Annika.

However, she now wants me to go find her a proper Daphne dress, you know one that looks like this:

And not one that looks like a drag queen. (This is, by the way, the actual adult version of this costume. It’s kind of torturous, don’t you think?)

I bought all of my stuff at thrift stores with the exception of the socks, which I got at Academy (a sporting gear store. Think, softball knee socks.) And so since Annika wants to do this again for Halloween, with the proper outfit, I figure I might as well do Velma up properly and go find myself an orange turtleneck.

Woo hoo!

This might not make life easier for all mothers, but it would for me. Let’s get this thing here in the U.S. already!

I’m freaking tired of reading about how ungodly hard mothering is. Yeah, we fucking know! So what are we going to do about it as a society?

First of all, I just want to say, all the reasons that people are always listing about why mothering is hard are wrong. I’m not a housekeeper, a cook, a janitor, a chauffeur, a therapist, an office manager, a CEO, or any of the other stupid things assigned to me in articles like this.

There is only one reason why mothering is hard. It’s because you are in charge of other human beings. Adding a few extra loads of laundry per week to your household duties, driving someone to a class/school, and cooking for other people is not the hard part. It’s the fact that you are in charge of getting tiny, irrational, emotionally immature, underdeveloped human beings. You have to get them to move their bodies and eat food and you’re in charge of their emotional well-being.

What pisses me off about those articles is that those ideas are extremely dismissive about what’s important to mothering.

Our culture isn’t set up to make mothering easier. Yesterday was Mother’s Day and in our culture buying a woman flowers and/or taking her out or fixing her food is how we tell ourselves we are being appreciative. And while it’s really nice to get flowers and food, it doesn’t truly make my life as a mother any easier.

Things Society Could Do to Make Mothering/Parenting Easier:

Give parents flex time at work. All people who have small/young human beings at home should be allowed to set their own schedule when possible.

Give parents extra time off work in the beginning. I’m not talking about six weeks or 12 weeks or whatever the fuck maternity leave is anymore. I’m talking, like six months, a year, 18 months. Yeah, that sounds good.

When Annika was six weeks old, I remember very clearly wondering just how the hell women went back to work at that time. I felt unbelievably grateful that I didn’t have to go back to work. Hell, my body wasn’t even fully healed. It took months and months to feel relatively normal again inside my own skin. I think that I would’ve had a full-on mental breakdown if I’d had to put my baby in daycare at six weeks. And it breaks my heart to think that we are a country full of women who often feel like they simply have no other choice.

Automatically give parents food stamps and free health care for themselves and their children.

Give businesses tax breaks for hiring parents back into the workforce after a few years of staying at home to take care of infants/toddlers.

Stop being such jerks about public school. I don’t know about other places and frankly I’m too tired to look it up, but here in Austin, TX, you can get a ticket if your child is late to school too many times. When I was a kid, if your parent wanted to let you play hooky or if you were late, it was no big deal. They wrote a note. Nowadays, parents are getting in trouble. What the EVERLOVINGFUCK is that about? It’s bullshit. And it has zero to do with education and all to do with money/financial support from the government who thinks that if they hold everyone accountable with anal retentive standards that somehow we will become a smarter society. They have it so, so very wrong.

Give parents access to free or low-cost therapy. Parents need to vent. A lot. They also need to have someone to bounce ideas off of and work out their own shit inside of a safe space.

Let’s start talking about what’s really hard about mothering/parenting. I think we all know that we are generally appreciated. But it’d be really fucking nice if society started helping move that into making our daily lives easier instead of minimizing mothers by appreciating us with a commercialized annual meal.

Yeah, it was a white cat. I’m aware of the irony.

When Annika was a baby, I once casually mentioned to Toyin that I’d like to dress her as Snow White for Halloween. He rolled his eyes and scoffed, “You can’t dress a black child as Snow White!” He was joking, mostly.

But even so, that year, I dressed her as a kitty cat, because she could say cat.

Oddly, Toyin doesn’t remember that conversation, or perhaps, remembers it differently than I do. A few years later, when Annika was 3.5, one of his family members sent us a Snow White costume for a Christmas present, which we both enjoyed watching her get excited over and immediately put it on and dance around. By that time, it was no big deal. Or was it? As I watched her pull it out and realized what it was, I flashed back to that conversation, when all of this was so new.

Snow White

Thinking about race and skin color enters into the most mundane of choices when you have a mixed race family.

If the opposite had happened, let’s say my white daughter wanted to dress up as say, Diana Ross, I would probably be thrilled with her choice, glad my child was so multiculturally aware and being the raging liberal that I am I would brag about it to all my friends.

Or, if say, my boy child wanted to wear a Daphne costume, for me, here in uber gender liberal Austin, I’d be so ridiculously proud and defend his choice tooth and nail like this mom did a few years back.

So when my brown-skinned daughter wants to dress up as a white character, coincidentally, also Daphne from Scooby Doo, why do I feel mildly ill at the thought?

I posed this question on my Facebook page a couple of days ago and got the same thoughts back at me that I’d been thinking myself.

The gist of the commenters said what I’d been telling myself, “She can be whomever she chooses. It’s not about race. It’s about what she likes to watch on TV. It’s no big deal.”

And they are right. I was right. I went ahead and ordered the costume. She wants to dress as Daphne for her Scooby Doo themed birthday party. I will not say a word when she puts on the costume as I didn’t when she dressed as Snow White. When she dressed as Ruby Gloom/Tinkerbell.

I think what all these thoughts are telling me is this.

It’s not that fact that my child wishes to dress up as a white character. It’s the fact that most characters are white. It’s that there are so few reflections in the media for her that she only sees white.

It’s true that what we see reflects back on us, in all walks of life. And if the equality in children’s programming was more balanced, I would have less of an issue with it. But it’s not.

Basically, there’s nothing wrong with my child. What’s wrong is societal messages and media reflections. It’s time to change that.

I can’t do much with that. Sure, I could lobby and join groups that support media issues. But honestly, I’d rather spend my time being a mom and doing the best with what we’ve got. In time, all of this will change. I know it because I see it happening.

Every generation keeps the talks going along and eventually, equality and fairness will win out in the racial divide. I believe that wholeheartedly, although, I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime.

But for now, what I have to do is go out of my way to ensure that my daughter see whatever reflections that are there.

I’ve started coming up with a list of non-white characters that I will do my best to insert into her regular viewing. I’m not going to try to cut out white characters, but do whatever I can to show her that the others exist.

Off the top of my head I can think of exactly one black female cartoon character that Annika watches semi regularly.

Word Girl (love this show)

After a bit of Googling, I came up with this list of age appropriate black, female characters:

Keesha Franklin from The Magic School Bus

Orange Blossom from Strawberry Shortcake

Goo from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends

Susie Carmichael from Rugrats (pretty sure I wouldn’t let A watch this show)

Iridessa from Tinkerbell

Indigo from Rainbow Brite (is this one really old?)

These are the ones I could find on top 10 lists of good black cartoons.

I found mention of a cartoon called The Proud Family, which I’ve never heard of, but I’m curious. It looks wholesome enough.

I’m hoping that I’ve missed some obvious ones, because this list is a little short, don’t you think?

Edited to include:

Doc McStuffins (ironically, we have a puzzle with her, didn’t even know it was a cartoon)

Princess Pea on Super Why (according to Wikipedia, she’s biracial: Here’s an article explaining how we know that http://blackwomenwhitemen.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/pbs-kids-biracial-children-on-tv-part-2/)

April Glover, big sis on Little Bill

Miss Elaina on Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood

Koki from Wild Kratts, a PBS show that looks pretty good. We’ll have to check it out.

I haven’t used this thing in years. I had even forgotten that I had it. Then I remember how much better rested I used to be when I wore it.

I hate sleeping with lights on in my room, yet, I have a nightlight for Annika. She’s been “scared of the dark” since she was about 3.

So, the past two nights I’ve worn it. I’m waking up feeling more refreshed, better rested than I have in years. It’s amazing. Get one.

Side note: Yes, I realize I haven’t updated this blog in about two months. I know. I’m sure nobody’s reading anymore except the few hundred spam bots and unbelievably stupid guest posters who keep emailing me with ridiculous ideas like, “How to Find a Babysitter.” Yes, because all my readers, who are interested in hearing about a single mom who parents using attachment parenting principles are interested in using Craigslist to find a nanny. Um, no thanks.