Elmo and the “Beloved Community”: The Conservative Right’s Assault on Sesame Street

Elmo and the “Beloved Community”: 

The Conservative Right’s Assault on Sesame Street

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

Over the summer, Ben Shapiro, while making an appearance on Fox News’ Hannity,  “jokingly” announced his desire to “cap” the characters of Sesame Street.  He followed this up with more “serious” criticisms, denouncing America’s favorite kid’s show because of its “soft bigotry of low expectations,” its promotion of “gender neutral language,” and its advocacy to “give boys dolls and girls fire trucks.”  The other members of Hannity’s “great all-American” panel similarly spoke about the downgrading of America’s moral fabric, seemingly linking the messages of Sesame Street to the cultural wars.   The Huffington Post describes his criticism of Sesame Street in the following way:

Chief amongst Shapiro's alleged liberal offenders is Sesame Street, the Jim Henson-created educational show carried on PBS, the public network with few conservative fans or defenders.

Citing interviews with one of the show's creators, early episodes of the show featuring hippies and racial reconciliation and, more recently, incidents such as 2009's "Pox News" controversy, Shapiro writes that "Sesame Street tried to tackle divorce, tackled 'peaceful conflict resolution' in the aftermath of 9/11 and had Neil Patrick Harris on the show playing the subtly-named 'fairy shoeperson.'"

Patrick Harris, to Shapiro's chagrin, is gay. And, even scarier, Cookie Monster says cookies are only a sometimes food now; the venerable sweets machine has added fruits and vegetables to his diet, indicating a major liberal plot.

On Martin Bashir’s show on MSNBC, Shapiro similarly denounced children’s television for promoting “a self-esteem ethos, the idea that, to paraphrase Barney ‘everyone is special’; an unearned self-esteem.”

The attacks on Sesame Street (and by extension the liberal media and big government intrusion in family matters) are nothing new.  A 1992 column in The Economist similarly denounced Sesame Street as a liberal assault on American values:

The problem comes when the sensible tolerance and respect of “Sesame Street” are mutated into something less appealing. First, it becomes a kind of hypertolerance (which argues, for example, that the canon of black female authors is as rich as that of white male authors); which is merely silly. Second, it becomes an intolerance of those who do not practice this hyper-tolerance (so that anyone who argues that a canon of authors who happen to be white and male is better than the one picked by sex and skin color is a racist sexist); which is pernicious. It is the intolerance that has come to be called “political correctness”—or PC (Sesame Street, the acceptable face 1992, A30).

The criticisms that “multiculturalism” or “tolerance” represents a vehicle for the “intolerance” for dominant values (white, Christian, middle-class) that have purportedly been central to America’s historic greatness are common to the broader culture.  Equally troubling to those critics of Sesame Street is not only tax-payer support for a program that is neither intended for white-middle class audiences (Shapiro notes the history behind Sesame Street), but in their mind devalues whiteness for the sake of multiculturalism agenda. 

To understand this criticism and to comprehend the right’s denunciation of Sesame Street mandates an examination of this larger history and the ways in which Sesame Street has built upon the civil rights movements and those concerned with justice, equality, and fairness.   In 1979, The New York Times identified the primary focus of Sesame Street as the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster.” Jennifer Mandel, in “The Production of a Beloved Community: Sesame Street’s Answer to America’s Inequalities,” argues that while the original intended audience for the show was “disadvantaged urban youth” who suffered because of “the limited availability of preschool education” the appeal and impact of the show transcended any particular demographic.   While addressing structural inequalities and countering the systemic failures in America’s educational television was part of the show’s mission, it more masterfully offered a utopic vision of America and the broader world. 

Joel Spring describes the mission of Children’s Television Workshop with Sesame Street as one bound by a desire “to shape public morality” and offer “a standard as to what the world should be like.  Or as Robin D.G. Kelley might describe it, it is a show dedicated to the cultivation of “freedom dreams.”  Imagining a place of “sweet air” and “sunny days” that “sweep the clouds away,” where “friendly neighborhoods” meet and “doors are open wide” Sesame Street is a utopia worthy of any person’s imagination.  Virginia Heffernan describes the show’s message and transformative representational politics as follows:

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don't tell the kids.

The power of Sesame Street doesn’t merely resonate with its history, its identification with King’s Beloved Community, its efforts to challenge differential access to educational opportunities or even its emphasis “on the representations of diverse groups” (Kraidy 2002), but through its opposition to the normalization of whiteness; its power rests with its critiques of and counter narratives to hegemonic notions of identity.  

It is easy to come up with countless examples where Sesame Street sought to challenge dominant white racial frames, particularly those that reinforced the desirability and hyper visibility of white, male, heterosexual middle-class identities.  For example, in 1971, Jesse Jackson dropped by Sesame Street, where he offered a call and response reciting of his famous “I am somebody.”  Surrounded by a diverse group of kids, Jackson and the kids announced

I am somebody

I am somebody

I may be poor

But I am somebody

I may be young

But I am somebody

I may be small

But I am somebody

I may make a mistake

But I am somebody

My clothes are different

My face is different

My hair is different

But I am somebody

I am black; brown; white

I speak a different language

But I must be respected, protected, and never rejected

I am God’s child

I am somebody.

Jackson’s appearance highlights Sesame Street’smission and the goal of King’s Beloved Community, a place where differences are celebrated, where the humanity of each member of a community is acknowledged and respected, and where “people at the grassroots and community level” equally participate “in creating new values, truths, relationships, and infrastructures as the foundation for a new society” (Boggs 2004). At the same time, this moment highlights the ways in which Sesame Street has long challenged privilege and normalizing discourses.  Similar themes remain central to Sesame Street today.

Calling upon kids to dream and recognize the beauty of diversity, Will-I-Am continues the message of Jackson with “What I am.”  Joined by a crew of Muppets, he sings, “If what I am is what’s in me, then I’ll stay strong, that’s who I will be.”   

Similarly Kingston, who is a favorite in our house, so often delivers not just a message about the beauty of diversity but the problematic demands of homogeneity and authenticity from popular discourses, which punishes those who embrace counter or oppositional identities.   Kingston, who wears a sweater vest and tie, celebrate his own unique identity in “Happy to me,” singing, “I watch all my friends turn their hats to the back, but I kept to the front because I like it like that.  Not trying to be different, just doin my own thing.”  With a hook of “be yourself, its easy as A-B-C . . . just happy to be me” and “I do it my way,” Kingston brings to light the pressures to embrace and perform particular identities, opening up a space for a myriad of ways of being. 

Likewise, one of Sesame Street most celebrated segments similarly embraces the diversity that exists between and within racialized communities, questioning the discursive articulations of authenticity so commonplace within society. In 2010, “I love my hair” captured the imagination of many individuals, further illustrating Sesame Street’s power and purpose.  In the song, a young black girl Muppet sings

Don’t need a trip to the beauty shop,
’cause I love what I got on top.
It’s curly and it’s brown and it’s right up there!
You know what I love? That’s right, my hair!
I really love my hair.
I love my hair. I love my hair.
There’s nothing else that can compare with my hair.
I love my hair, so I must declare:
I really, really, really love my hair.
Wear a clippy or in a bow
Or let it sit in an afro
My hair looks good in a cornrow
It does so many things you know, that’s why I let it grow
I love my hair, I love my hair
I love it and I have to share
I love my hair, I love my hair!
I want to make the world aware I love my hair.
I wear it up. I wear down. I wear it twisted all around.
I wear braids and pigtails too.
I love all the things my hair can do.
In barrettes or flying free, ever perfect tresses you’ll see
My hair is part of me, an awesome part of me
I really love my hair!

Kai Wright describes not only the song and video, but it’s significance, in the following way:

Sesame Street got more than the kiddies’ attention when it took on black women’s hair. . . . An adorable black girl Muppet dances up to the camera and starts belting an ode to herself: The girl goes on and on in unselfconscious adoration of herself. Then she sings that one of the great things about her hair is all the cool stuff she can do with it—an Afro, cornrows, braids, dreadlocks. Even stick a bow in it. Good stuff Sesame Street. Good stuff”

Celebrating the ways in which the song distinguishes “between style and self-hate,” Wright praises it for its intervention against a larger history of white supremacy.  He and others rightly note how it speaks against a larger history and discourse that has used hair (hair politics) to pathologize and demonize blackness.  A story on The Root.com further emphasizes the important message and the larger history embedded within this song

Sesame Street works off of a platform that permeates both childhood and adulthood -- it's designed down to the smallest detail to teach children (and adults) through pictures, sounds and subliminal messaging. Thus, it's easy to see how a song like "I Love My Hair" could bring a grandmother or parent of a black child to tears. Looking past the puppet, you can clearly see and hear a positive message that says, "You are beautiful." It's a statement that seems so simple but is much more complex.

Many African-American families struggle with teaching their children to love not only themselves but also the things that make them unique: their full lips, wide noses and kinky hair. "African Americans as a people have had to battle the social idea that not only is our skin inferior, but that our hair is as well," says Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, visiting lecturer at Georgia State University's department of African-American studies. "We were treated as inferior by default simply because we were black, and because of this, we internalized these beliefs and unfortunately passed them down from generation to generation.

What is evident here is the ways in which Sesame Street has challenged the normalization of whiteness; it is sought to unsettle the hegemonic celebration and normalization of white (male; heterosexual; Christian; middle-class suburban) identity within and beyond popular culture.  And this is brings me back to Ben Shapiro’s criticism of Sesame Street.  While he was positioned within the public discourse as a conservative being critical of the liberal bias of the media, the insidious nature of his criticism transcends that clichéd position: it is a criticism reflective or and in the advancement of a new racist agenda.  By denouncing Sesame Street for “promoting a self-esteem ethos, the idea that, to paraphrase Barney ‘everyone is special’; an unearned self-esteem” Shapiro appears to criticize the show for challenging and unsettling the privilege of white (heterosexual Christian) identity. 

At its core, the criticisms directed at Sesame Street are racially coded and racially reactionary; it is not simply a matter of the unnatural celebration of undesirable and inferior identities and experiences but denying white male Christian identity its rightful place on America’s cultural mantle.  The argument offered by Shapiro and others imagines Sesame Street as a white-funded source of propaganda that unnaturally elevates racial (and sexual) Others all while denying the beauty and superiority of whiteness.   While often celebrating their idea of King’s dream, the right has actively opposed policy and societal implementation of King’s dream/Beloved Community into our daily lives.  Their hypocrisy illustrates the hollowness of this support.  Given the history of the show and the efforts to challenge, in message and in its opposition to invisibility, the systemic normalization of particular white identities, it is hard not to see his comments as part of a larger backlash against multiculturalism and any effort that unsettles the hegemony of whiteness.   It isn’t simply about liberal bias but the perceived threats to whiteness.

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.