A reader reflects:
That first Sesame Street episode made a big impression when I was five. The show’s premier was a major event for the white progressive moms in my neighborhood in Evanston, IL. I was actually wrangled before the TV set and told to watch it, a strange act for my mother, who was very anti-TV and later, in my early adolescence, refused on principal to repair the same set, leaving me tube-less until I moved away to university.
I was hooked on Sesame Street from the downbeat of the almost funky comp that underlies the theme song. The beautiful, gritty but fun scenes of children in New York fascinated me. They reminded me and eased my fears of what I considered to be a scary, urban world, only blocks away, across Howard St., the border of leafy, suburban Evanston with the City of Chicago.
At the time, the show didn’t seem so radical. Evanston was integrating. I had strong, quiet, proud, loving black teachers like Sesame Street’s Gordon, as well as black, Latin and Asian friends. I was a non-denominational child surrounded by Jewish and Catholic neighbors. But looking at it again from four decades on in the age of Obama, my goodness! It premiered the year after Martin Luther King’s murder, and its first scene has Gordon leading a little white girl down a big-city street and introducing her to all her new neighbors as if it was normal. My God, it wasn’t normal, but because of the show many of us were given the idea that it could be and, you know what, it’s no longer strange. We weren’t in bloody Kansas anymore.
Sesame Street was such a glorious, stealthy challenge to the status quo. I and millions of others, all blank slates, had the A-B-Cs, 1-2-3s and message of how people from different backgrounds can learn, grow and live together, written on us. It was given gently and with love by Gordon, Mr. Hooper, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Ernie & Bert and Grover. Even Stevie Wonder got into the act. If you want to see how cool Sesame Street is, look up the video of Stevie playing Superstitious on the show. It would make a great Mental Health Break if you haven’t run it already.
How people can get so worked up about PBS when it costs so little and has delivered things as great as Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, Julia Child, Masterpiece Theatre and Nova seems to me small and cruel.
The Dish 