Cheerios ad featuring interracial family sparks racist comments

It's hard to image a commercial that shows an interracial couple actually causing a stir in this day in age, but yet here we are. Racism is alive and well.

A Cheerios commercial featuring a biracial girl and her parents has sparked an onslaught of hate-filled comments after being posted on YouTube and subsequently being posted on Reddit by a user praising the ad.

The racist backlash has prompted General Mills to shut down the comments section on the YouTube video, but not before AdWeek had the pleasure of reporting that commenters made references to Nazis, "troglodytes" and "racial genocide."

Also see: Ad slammed as the 'most racist in history'

The company is even taking heat on their Cheerios Facebook page, but for every hateful comment posted, there are dozens of comments calling them out.

For example, one commenter, Michael Dispigno from Brooklyn, N.Y. suggests black men are deadbeat fathers.

"More like single parent in the making. Black dad will dip out soon," he writes.

British woman Sarah Jeory from Liverpool responds, "Well your racism just made international news, here I am reading it in U.K. Hopefully your bosses will read it soon....if you work that is."

Also see: Men cry foul over 'sexist' new ad

The ad from Saatchi & Saatchi agency in New York City shouldn't really be news. Yet the lack of representation of interracial marriages in advertisements is still a pervasive problem, failing to keep pace with the demographic reality of interracial relationship in the western world.

According to the latest Statistics Canada data, which is rather outdated yet still telling of a general trend, the number of mixed race relationships swelled by 33 per cent between the 2001 and 2006.

And in the U.S., mixed race households of opposite sexed partners jumped by 28 per cent from 2000 to 2010, according to their Census Bureau.

What do you think of the Cheerios commercial and the racist backlash towards it?