I’ve been reading *Street Gang*, a very comprehensive history of the making of Sesame Street, and I feel like the portrayal of Sesame Street here ignores key parts of the show’s founding and ethos, as well as corrections made early on in reaction to demands from various identity groups.
For starters, the show was intentionally aimed at black children in ghettos. The brownstone and many other elements of the set are intended to reflect areas of NYC that were overwhelmingly minority (Harlem; Bed-Stuy; South Bronx). The popularity of the show, and most of the methods of presentation shroud this: A large majority of the children who loved the show were white, and most of the Muppets (but not all; see below) also coded as white.
Matt Thompson, who originally played Gordon on the show, developed the character of Roosevelt Franklin to directly address this: A wisecracking boy who took to the front of the classroom to teach lessons to his peers. Franklin and the other muppets in his class were similar colors to other Muppets (purple; blue), but their hair and speech patterns coded them as undeniably, and unapologetically, Black. Sometimes the lessons were fairly universal (“if someone hurts your feelings, let them know”; this may be controversial these days), but others would have fit in with Black Power, consciousness-raising lessons of the time, brought to the level of preschoolers: Franklin shows on a map that Africa is much more than jungles (that it is not a country was saved for The Electric Company (jk ;-)).
I fondly remember Roosevelt Franklin, and was surprised to learn from *Street Gang* that he was “cancelled” because of objections from middle-class Blacks that Franklin made them look bad. Looking at the current attempts by Sesame Street to address race, I still don’t understand why they don’t just bring the character back.
[Side note: Chris needs a rewrite on that song:
“I look like caramel!”
“I look like a lion!”
“I look like…a walnut tree. (Sigh)”]
The show certainly was read by the actual people living in poorer, non-white neighborhoods as about them, and in an echo of representational politics today, some demanded the show have them on. Actress Sonia Manzano definitely saw her neighborhood on the show, and got cast as Maria as a result of direct political action from the nascent Hispanic movement (blindsiding the female Black activist who was doing community outreach for the show in Black neighborhoods). The Franklin misstep notwithstanding, the show continued to take time to do things like invite Nina Simone to come on to sing “To Be Young, Gifted And Black”:
So there’s certainly an approach that Sesame Street can take that doesn’t crumble into mealy-mouthed “colorblindness” but also doesn’t try to place a heavy guilt trip on white toddlers; they already did it 50 years ago!
So this comment has been rolling around my head. First I’m not sure what qualifies as “mealy-mouthed color blindness,” curious what you meant. Second while the Simone song made sense in 1972 and is sweet on its own, it sends an odd message in 2021 if sent under the umbrella of anti-racism to a national audience. I didn’t express clearly enough in this piece that I think the conflicting perceptions of what racism is reflect conflicting cultural norms, and *both sides will continue to see racism as an intractable evil that the other side is responsible for unless we can each start to understand the opposite perspective.* We cannot tell children that your race matters if you’re not white and doesn’t matter if you’re white… we will continue to clash. More controversially, my claim is that telling kids of color that their race matters a LOT is built on the expectation that they will face a LOT of racism- hardly an effective form of anti-racism. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as people sense racism in otherwise innocuous acts, because the expectation that they will be a target of racism has been built into their identity since childhood. Where is the balance, as children of color certainly will face SOME racism, more racism than a white child? That was the balance I was trying to strike with my list at the end, which may strike some as mealy-mouthed… Im not offended by alternative ideas though.
There is certainly a lot to criticize in the area of racial sensitivity education for children. For my part, though, I've been struck much more by the omission of just plain historical facts from K-12 education. I'm in my mid-50's and grew up in the Midwest. We really did learn just about 4 things about American history in this country concerning our black citizens: slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow and the KKK and the Civil Rights Movement with MLK. There was absolutely nothing about Black Wall Street, the Great Migration, red lining, let alone anything current (mass incarceration, voter suppression, etc.). I think I would be more sympathetic to the conservative concerns if they could be really honest about how much of the story has been completely untold.
Everything you list seems fair game to include in a well-rounded American History (though I think a lot gets left on the cutting room floor with usually only one academic year of American history in HS). I don’t think most conservatives would oppose including it, depending on what gets caught to make room. I think they do have an issue with suggesting modern white people bear any guilt for historical acts also carried out by white people, or any more responsibility to repair them than anyone else. And some of them are almost religious in their patriotism, might have issue with suggesting America isn’t perfect. I have no patience for that crew. But if your kid’s teacher is saying that “America is awful and racist to the core,” many reasonable people would object.
I must admit to wondering what the teachers actually are saying to students that is so upsetting. I get the impression that the simple act of talking about an uncomfortable issue is enough to get people riled up.
I certainly think things are so polarized, people are wound up to react at the tiniest sign that their kids school or teacher is on the “other side.” But there is a pretty cringey growing list of examples circulating from folks like Rufo, Bari Weiss, FAIR, the super anti-wokes who seem motivated to find and amplify them. Not really my “tribe” but the examples seem real. Of course polarization + nationalization lets people get worked up about something in one classroom in Oregon that doesn’t affect their kid at all. That’s why I was interested in deep diving the two lenses looking at kids television specifically- you know you’re aiming for everyone so you’d think you’d try to make the lessons as universal as possible.
Excellent point. Makes me think that the woke bunch got a bit ahead of themselves by choosing to act like activists rather than politicians attuned to what people hear when they speak
Like, I'm trying to imagine the horror I would feel if a book was published by conservatives aimed at black children telling them that "blackness" wasn't their idea, it's a deal with the devil they can reject, and their parents are dumb/evil. What the what what?
Another interesting, complicated set of questions.
One note I'd make about the different Sesame Street songs is that they respond to different questions. Broadly speaking I'd categorize those as covering,
"What does it say about each of us that we have different colored skin?" (answer, we're all human together
"How should I feel when I hear things that make me feel badly about the color of my skin?" (answer, own your sense of yourself, and don't let other people define you -- and yes, the same message should apply to white people)
"How is it that that patterns of discrimination are so persistent, and that our experiences in the world can be so influenced by the color of our skin, and the expectations or biases that other people have based on the color of our skin?" (answer: this is going to take a while . . .)
They are all important questions and, yes, the first one is the most comfortable question and answer -- the latter two don't present an easy solution.
I don't think he provides an easy answer, either, and his fallibility and uncertainty is part of the story.
I recommend it, it's a quick read -- about an hour, so there's no reason for me to say too much, but in the linked interview he say,
"When the Congressman [John Lewis] was still with us and we were doing a lot of talks, I would try and sort of highlight what my own journey with a parent was, addressing the history of the Civil Rights movement with my 4-, 5-, 6-year old."
"People need to know that if you’re the guide to help a really young person dig through some of this stuff, you don’t need to lay the whole thing out at once. It really does involve a mindfulness and seeing where they are and what their world looks like, and then trying to make it meet wherever you can. And there are always more opportunities, because there are always questions with smaller kids. Just trust the questions, and it gives you a chance to go deeper the next time."
As another sign of how topical these questions are, Timothy Burke just posted the following today. I think it relates to the need to have simplified versions of out collective cultural stories and also that we be capable of reading them critically: https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-re-read-star-trek-log-three-critical
"In [Alan Dean Foster's] adapation of the [Star Trek] episode “Once Upon a Planet”, which takes the Enterprise crew back to the recreational planet first seen in the original series episode “Shore Leave”, Lieutenant Uhura has been captured by the planetary computer and brought underground. Spock and Kirk have contrived a plan to get to the computer themselves to find out why the planet has turned hostile. All three of them end up in a dialogue with the planetary computer in which they try to find out what’s going on. The computer informs them that it’s sick of being a slave to the dreams of organic life forms and that it intends to build a copy of itself aboard the Enterprise and travel the galaxy looking for other computers.
...
In the episode script, Uhura comments at this point, “There’s no shame in serving others, as long as one does it of his own free will.”
In Foster’s adapation, Uhura adds, “My ancestors did the same”.
...
Why I say that I don’t think this is on Foster is because that was a general thought for white liberalism in 1975. That a postracial future would result in black subjects who no longer felt any connection to the history of enslavement and could misremember that history as much as any St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the US can transform the specifics of Irish or Irish-American history into a sentimental haze.
Critical race theory is a specific, empirical body of research about the structural reproduction of racism, but it also opens up a wider understanding of how it has been possible for white Americans to think something like, “A future black person won’t need to remember slavery as the painful precursor to their own present subjectivity”. More than that: ever since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, many whites have been trying to imagine that they are already in that moment, that it’s time for black people to stop dwelling on slavery, Jim Crow and racial inequality, to already be telling that “half-lie” in the interests of everybody getting along. "
So I’ll probably comment on his Substack too, but this story does not make sense to me. He says Forster gives Uhura a backstory as a “ Masaai teenager from East Africa.” So she is not a descendant of American slavery. Maybe African slavery? This seems to me to be a critique of the overuse of CRT- it has the tendency to flatten the “black experience” to match an ADOS experience.
Part of what has always bothered me about the new woke approach to combatting racism is that it seems to be predicated a racial binary of a black and white America. But that is increasingly less true as time goes on and the US becomes truly multicultural: by 2050 projections are that Whites will be the largest racial plurality in the country, followed by Latinos. At that point the number of Asian citizens will have grown to the point where 12% of the total population will be Asian--the same percentage as blacks. If everyone is taught that their skin color is of critical important the US will not be divided into two tribes but rather a manifold number. And if tribal allegiance is paramount the conflict will not be between a rainbow coalition of minorities versus their white oppressors: it will be Asians versus Hispanics versus blacks versus whites etc.
I look at the explosion of anti-Asian hate crimes over this last summer and have to wonder if it's any coincidence that so many of the perpetrators seem to be African American.
I’ve been reading *Street Gang*, a very comprehensive history of the making of Sesame Street, and I feel like the portrayal of Sesame Street here ignores key parts of the show’s founding and ethos, as well as corrections made early on in reaction to demands from various identity groups.
For starters, the show was intentionally aimed at black children in ghettos. The brownstone and many other elements of the set are intended to reflect areas of NYC that were overwhelmingly minority (Harlem; Bed-Stuy; South Bronx). The popularity of the show, and most of the methods of presentation shroud this: A large majority of the children who loved the show were white, and most of the Muppets (but not all; see below) also coded as white.
Matt Thompson, who originally played Gordon on the show, developed the character of Roosevelt Franklin to directly address this: A wisecracking boy who took to the front of the classroom to teach lessons to his peers. Franklin and the other muppets in his class were similar colors to other Muppets (purple; blue), but their hair and speech patterns coded them as undeniably, and unapologetically, Black. Sometimes the lessons were fairly universal (“if someone hurts your feelings, let them know”; this may be controversial these days), but others would have fit in with Black Power, consciousness-raising lessons of the time, brought to the level of preschoolers: Franklin shows on a map that Africa is much more than jungles (that it is not a country was saved for The Electric Company (jk ;-)).
I fondly remember Roosevelt Franklin, and was surprised to learn from *Street Gang* that he was “cancelled” because of objections from middle-class Blacks that Franklin made them look bad. Looking at the current attempts by Sesame Street to address race, I still don’t understand why they don’t just bring the character back.
[Side note: Chris needs a rewrite on that song:
“I look like caramel!”
“I look like a lion!”
“I look like…a walnut tree. (Sigh)”]
The show certainly was read by the actual people living in poorer, non-white neighborhoods as about them, and in an echo of representational politics today, some demanded the show have them on. Actress Sonia Manzano definitely saw her neighborhood on the show, and got cast as Maria as a result of direct political action from the nascent Hispanic movement (blindsiding the female Black activist who was doing community outreach for the show in Black neighborhoods). The Franklin misstep notwithstanding, the show continued to take time to do things like invite Nina Simone to come on to sing “To Be Young, Gifted And Black”:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I-f3PYJT5mU
So there’s certainly an approach that Sesame Street can take that doesn’t crumble into mealy-mouthed “colorblindness” but also doesn’t try to place a heavy guilt trip on white toddlers; they already did it 50 years ago!
So this comment has been rolling around my head. First I’m not sure what qualifies as “mealy-mouthed color blindness,” curious what you meant. Second while the Simone song made sense in 1972 and is sweet on its own, it sends an odd message in 2021 if sent under the umbrella of anti-racism to a national audience. I didn’t express clearly enough in this piece that I think the conflicting perceptions of what racism is reflect conflicting cultural norms, and *both sides will continue to see racism as an intractable evil that the other side is responsible for unless we can each start to understand the opposite perspective.* We cannot tell children that your race matters if you’re not white and doesn’t matter if you’re white… we will continue to clash. More controversially, my claim is that telling kids of color that their race matters a LOT is built on the expectation that they will face a LOT of racism- hardly an effective form of anti-racism. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as people sense racism in otherwise innocuous acts, because the expectation that they will be a target of racism has been built into their identity since childhood. Where is the balance, as children of color certainly will face SOME racism, more racism than a white child? That was the balance I was trying to strike with my list at the end, which may strike some as mealy-mouthed… Im not offended by alternative ideas though.
Man, another book to put on my list! Thanks for sharing.
There is certainly a lot to criticize in the area of racial sensitivity education for children. For my part, though, I've been struck much more by the omission of just plain historical facts from K-12 education. I'm in my mid-50's and grew up in the Midwest. We really did learn just about 4 things about American history in this country concerning our black citizens: slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow and the KKK and the Civil Rights Movement with MLK. There was absolutely nothing about Black Wall Street, the Great Migration, red lining, let alone anything current (mass incarceration, voter suppression, etc.). I think I would be more sympathetic to the conservative concerns if they could be really honest about how much of the story has been completely untold.
Everything you list seems fair game to include in a well-rounded American History (though I think a lot gets left on the cutting room floor with usually only one academic year of American history in HS). I don’t think most conservatives would oppose including it, depending on what gets caught to make room. I think they do have an issue with suggesting modern white people bear any guilt for historical acts also carried out by white people, or any more responsibility to repair them than anyone else. And some of them are almost religious in their patriotism, might have issue with suggesting America isn’t perfect. I have no patience for that crew. But if your kid’s teacher is saying that “America is awful and racist to the core,” many reasonable people would object.
I must admit to wondering what the teachers actually are saying to students that is so upsetting. I get the impression that the simple act of talking about an uncomfortable issue is enough to get people riled up.
I certainly think things are so polarized, people are wound up to react at the tiniest sign that their kids school or teacher is on the “other side.” But there is a pretty cringey growing list of examples circulating from folks like Rufo, Bari Weiss, FAIR, the super anti-wokes who seem motivated to find and amplify them. Not really my “tribe” but the examples seem real. Of course polarization + nationalization lets people get worked up about something in one classroom in Oregon that doesn’t affect their kid at all. That’s why I was interested in deep diving the two lenses looking at kids television specifically- you know you’re aiming for everyone so you’d think you’d try to make the lessons as universal as possible.
Excellent point. Makes me think that the woke bunch got a bit ahead of themselves by choosing to act like activists rather than politicians attuned to what people hear when they speak
Came across this example, can't believe I forgot about it. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/should-black-lives-matter-agenda-be-taught-school/618277/ The first example of the book covered in a kindergarten classroom is pretty disturbing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2WKUS2XS2PUGT/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1948340003
Trailer for book: https://player.vimeo.com/video/281897751
Like, I'm trying to imagine the horror I would feel if a book was published by conservatives aimed at black children telling them that "blackness" wasn't their idea, it's a deal with the devil they can reject, and their parents are dumb/evil. What the what what?
As Jonathan Haidt says, “morality binds and blinds”
Another interesting, complicated set of questions.
One note I'd make about the different Sesame Street songs is that they respond to different questions. Broadly speaking I'd categorize those as covering,
"What does it say about each of us that we have different colored skin?" (answer, we're all human together
"How should I feel when I hear things that make me feel badly about the color of my skin?" (answer, own your sense of yourself, and don't let other people define you -- and yes, the same message should apply to white people)
"How is it that that patterns of discrimination are so persistent, and that our experiences in the world can be so influenced by the color of our skin, and the expectations or biases that other people have based on the color of our skin?" (answer: this is going to take a while . . .)
They are all important questions and, yes, the first one is the most comfortable question and answer -- the latter two don't present an easy solution.
Yesterday I just read _Save It For Later_ ( https://www.comicsbeat.com/interview-nate-powell-on-save-it-for-later/), a graphic memoir by the artist of _March_, which is primarily about the question of how to communicate the emotions of the Trump years to children.
I don't think he provides an easy answer, either, and his fallibility and uncertainty is part of the story.
I recommend it, it's a quick read -- about an hour, so there's no reason for me to say too much, but in the linked interview he say,
"When the Congressman [John Lewis] was still with us and we were doing a lot of talks, I would try and sort of highlight what my own journey with a parent was, addressing the history of the Civil Rights movement with my 4-, 5-, 6-year old."
"People need to know that if you’re the guide to help a really young person dig through some of this stuff, you don’t need to lay the whole thing out at once. It really does involve a mindfulness and seeing where they are and what their world looks like, and then trying to make it meet wherever you can. And there are always more opportunities, because there are always questions with smaller kids. Just trust the questions, and it gives you a chance to go deeper the next time."
As another sign of how topical these questions are, Timothy Burke just posted the following today. I think it relates to the need to have simplified versions of out collective cultural stories and also that we be capable of reading them critically: https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-re-read-star-trek-log-three-critical
"In [Alan Dean Foster's] adapation of the [Star Trek] episode “Once Upon a Planet”, which takes the Enterprise crew back to the recreational planet first seen in the original series episode “Shore Leave”, Lieutenant Uhura has been captured by the planetary computer and brought underground. Spock and Kirk have contrived a plan to get to the computer themselves to find out why the planet has turned hostile. All three of them end up in a dialogue with the planetary computer in which they try to find out what’s going on. The computer informs them that it’s sick of being a slave to the dreams of organic life forms and that it intends to build a copy of itself aboard the Enterprise and travel the galaxy looking for other computers.
...
In the episode script, Uhura comments at this point, “There’s no shame in serving others, as long as one does it of his own free will.”
In Foster’s adapation, Uhura adds, “My ancestors did the same”.
...
Why I say that I don’t think this is on Foster is because that was a general thought for white liberalism in 1975. That a postracial future would result in black subjects who no longer felt any connection to the history of enslavement and could misremember that history as much as any St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the US can transform the specifics of Irish or Irish-American history into a sentimental haze.
Critical race theory is a specific, empirical body of research about the structural reproduction of racism, but it also opens up a wider understanding of how it has been possible for white Americans to think something like, “A future black person won’t need to remember slavery as the painful precursor to their own present subjectivity”. More than that: ever since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, many whites have been trying to imagine that they are already in that moment, that it’s time for black people to stop dwelling on slavery, Jim Crow and racial inequality, to already be telling that “half-lie” in the interests of everybody getting along. "
So I’ll probably comment on his Substack too, but this story does not make sense to me. He says Forster gives Uhura a backstory as a “ Masaai teenager from East Africa.” So she is not a descendant of American slavery. Maybe African slavery? This seems to me to be a critique of the overuse of CRT- it has the tendency to flatten the “black experience” to match an ADOS experience.
ADOS was a new one for me
Fair point. I'd be curious to see if he replies -- I don't think that completely changes the point he's trying to make, but it does complicate it.
Part of what has always bothered me about the new woke approach to combatting racism is that it seems to be predicated a racial binary of a black and white America. But that is increasingly less true as time goes on and the US becomes truly multicultural: by 2050 projections are that Whites will be the largest racial plurality in the country, followed by Latinos. At that point the number of Asian citizens will have grown to the point where 12% of the total population will be Asian--the same percentage as blacks. If everyone is taught that their skin color is of critical important the US will not be divided into two tribes but rather a manifold number. And if tribal allegiance is paramount the conflict will not be between a rainbow coalition of minorities versus their white oppressors: it will be Asians versus Hispanics versus blacks versus whites etc.
I look at the explosion of anti-Asian hate crimes over this last summer and have to wonder if it's any coincidence that so many of the perpetrators seem to be African American.