"Hannah Montana" star Miley Cyrus has left her Disney image in the dust as of late. She sports a punky new hairdo, dresses provocatively and allegedly sings about drugs in her new single, "We Can't Stop." What's more, Cyrus twerked (also known as booty popping) during rapper Juicy J's recent performance at the House of Blues in Los Angeles and stepped out Wednesday at a MySpace event wearing a grill with a gold tooth. Throw in the fact that the writers of her new single said that Cyrus told them she wanted the song to be "urban" and "feel black," and now the starlet is being accused of "acting black" by some and criticized for appropriating black culture by others.

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The uproar over the Cheerios ad featuring a mixed-race family and the fact that June is the month when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed its ban on miscegenation in 1967 has earned interracial marriage plenty of press recently. On Thursday, the New York Times featured a panel of experts discussing whether such marriages remain scandalous in the United States. Each of the five experts pointed out that interracial couplings remain the subject of curiosity and bigotry, but they offered different reasons about how this plays out.

Diane Farr, an actress and author of Kissing Outside the Lines, said that parents are often to blame for stigmatizing mixed-race relationships. "Few peers of any recent generation give much thought to friends dating outside of their race," Farr remarked. "However, far too many Americans who dare to love someone of a different racial or cultural background find they will still have to face something unpleasant - ranging from disappointment to being disowned - from those people they loved first, their mothers and fathers." Read More...

The murder trial of George Zimmerman kicks off today, and there's no shortage of speculation about how its outcome will affect race relations. When Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman of white and Hispanic heritage, killed unarmed black youth Trayvon Martin last year in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., it sparked international outrage. That's because it took a month-and-a-half for police to arrest Zimmerman, who claimed he killed the 17-year-old in self-defense despite following the teen around the apartment complex for no reason other than that Trayvon, in a hoodie, appeared suspicious to Zimmerman.

Trayvon's murder inspired protests such as the Million Hoodie March and a backlash against Florida's Stand Your Ground law, which permits the use of force in cases of self-defense. Of course, Trayvon's killing also inflamed racial tensions. African Americans openly doubted that a black man would have been able to kill a white youth and evade arrest for six weeks as George Zimmerman did. Additionally, white supremacists hacked Trayvon Martin's email and even traveled to Sanford, Fla., to "defend" white residents. Read More...

Cheerios has been in the news for the past week due to a racist backlash against an ad of the company's featuring an interracial family. The ad, which is available online and includes a white mother, black father and biracial child, received so many hateful comments from racists upset that Cheerios highlighted a mixed-race family that General Mills shut down the comments section on the commercial's Web page. Today Cheerios representatives said that the company stood by the advertisement and would continue to broadcast it for the next several months.

"We felt like we were reflecting an American family," Camille Gibson, vice president of marketing for Cheerios, told ABC News. While the ad will continue running, Gibson declined to answer when asked if Cheerios will run future ads featuring interracial families. She did say, however, that despite the controversy, the overwhelming response from consumers about the ad has been positive. Read More...