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NY Expat's avatar

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!

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Jillian N Ritchie's avatar

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.

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