When Sesame Street premiered in November 1969, Kermit the Frog tried to teach young viewers about the letter W.
But then, Cookie Monster interrupted and ate a fourth of the letter, turning the W into an N. Trying to make lemonade out of lemons, Kermit then tried to teach children about the letter N. But Cookie Monster struck again, turning the N into a V and then the V into an I.
Cookie Monster then ate the I and tried to eat Kermit too.
At no point did the exasperated Kermit ask Cookie Monster what race he was.
Sesame Street has come a long way since 1969. On Thanksgiving Day, Sesame Street will introduce a new Muppet to the show, Ji-Young. She will be identified as a 7-year-old Korean American who loves electric guitar and skateboarding.
Of course, Ji-Young is not Korean American — she’s just felt, rubber, and foam, as were all Muppets for decades.
Oscar the Grouch, Grover, Snuffleupagus, Count von Count, Elmo, Ernie, and Bert — none of these were ever white or black or Latino or Asian. Their “skin” colors are green, blue, brown, purple, orange, red, and yellow, but none of them are identified as being a different race or ethnicity than any of the others. There is Rosita, the bilingual Mexican monster first introduced to the cast in 1991, but she isn’t even supposed to be human. Sesame Street’s cast has always been diverse. But it was only this year, with the introduction of two black Muppets and now an Asian Muppet, that human puppets were explicitly given racial identifications.
For the longest time, they were all just residents of a place called Sesame Street. That was enough to bind them into a community. This used to be enough for Americans, too — at least when we were at our best. Yes, we come from different places, but once we are born here in America or immigrate legally, we are all Americans, for whom race and origin are not important. We shared a single identity as inhabitants of the great melting pot.
That view has fallen out of favor. Now, critical race theory demands that we look at each other’s skin color first and judge. Race is the prism through which everything must now be viewed. So, of course, we can’t have new Muppets that are just from Sesame Street. Now, they must be first categorized on the scale of privilege and oppression.
This raises the question: Between frog and pig, who is the oppressed and the oppressor?
