Today, Explained - C is for Culture War

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Big Bird got vaccinated, an Asian American Muppet moved in, and conservatives got really mad at Sesame Street. Today’s show was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Check this out. One, two, three, four. Sesame Street recently had a first. I can't wait to play my guitar for everybody today.

I've been practicing and practicing with my harmony. The show added its first guitar-shredding Asian-American Muppet to its cast in the wake of recent attacks against Asian-Americans. What's wrong? Um, when I was coming back here, a kid yelled out at me to go back home. It really, really, really hurt my feelings. Of course it did. And together with her friends, Ji Young tackled race in the most Sesame Street way possible. La la la la la, we can show that we do it. La la la la la, and we sing this song.

But not everyone loved the new addition. When conservatives like CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp found out, They won't stop with their push for woke politics. They responded in one of the most conservative ways possible. Some conservatives are calling on the federal government to stop funding PBS over woke content on the program for kids, including Sesame Street. But it turns out Sesame Street's been doing this kind of thing since before Fox News or CPAC even existed.

To explain, we reached out to David Camp. I am the author of the book, Sunny Day is the Children's Television Revolution That Changed America. I was part of Generation Zero of Sesame Street viewers. I was a little toddler on November 10th, 1969, when the very first episode of Sesame Street, Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morissette, went into TV for a really weird reason. Not for the fame and money, but to do good. You know, they wanted to create a TV show that would specifically alleviate the effects of poverty and kind of the educational imbalance between more affluent, mostly white kids in the suburbs and inner city black kids. So from the get-go, Sesame Street, its primary audience at

the time was resource-deprived black kids living in big cities, 1969, 1970. Historically, Sesame Street has been designed as a show where people who are not you know part of the the white hegemony can feel seen the original target audience was black kids if you were a black kid watching at home and it was very rare to see black characters on television it was really validating to feel seen when you had human characters like Loretta Long as Susan, and those characters were very validating to Black viewers at home. I'd like to think that I am a positive image for a Black female. They've done research and they've done interviews and people said,

whether they were parents or kids, that made a difference to me. When did Sesame Street first attempt something like this? You know, introduce a Muppet to represent a specific group of people and not like a cookie monster? The very first season of Sesame Street, which was the 1969-70 season, Matt Robinson, who played Gordon on the show... It's just good old storekeeping Gordon. He was also a writer and Gordon on the show. It's just good old storekeeping Gordon. He was also a writer

and producer on the show, raised the point that there should be a Muppet who is palpably Black in mannerism and affect and speech patterns. He made the point that when a kid's around Sesame Street watching age, which at the time meant age four or five, that's precisely when a kid recognized that he or she is Black. And what does that mean? What does that mean about my place in the world? And so Matt Robinson said, we should have a Muppet character who is recognizably Black to kid viewers at home. Jim Henson, who was in charge of the Muppets, made the point at first that, well, you know, the Muppets are not of color,

you know, except the color that they are in terms of the materials they're made out of, like Kermit being green, Grover being blue. When I think it might be nicer being red or yellow or gold or something much more colorful like that. But Matt Robinson made a good point. He said, well, yeah, but all of you Muppet performers are white people and mostly white guys. So the default cultural references for the Muppet characters are basically white men. And so Jim Henson said, hey, you have a point. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickle pig feet, but my name is not

Peter Piper. It's Roosevelt Franklin, and I live on Sesame Street. This is a rarity, Roosevelt Franklin. He was a character who was developed not by Jim Henson and Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson and those guys, but by Matt Robinson. Unless I heard somebody wrong, somebody call me by both my names, my first name first and then my second name second. Roosevelt Franklin spoke in a kind of jivey street pattern that was very early 70s. He did not look African-American in appearance. He was a little purple guy with a shock of black hair,

but his speech affect was very black. And his mother was played by Loretta Long, the other black human performer on Sesame Street. And her speech affect was black. Well, we'll see if you know them for sure. I'm not so sure you even know, you know. I know. I know. I know. I know. Roosevelt Franklin, how old are you? I used to be one, now I'm gone on two. So they really went there in terms of creating these Muppet characters who, for Black kids, would have this valuable takeaway that for the first time in my life, I see a character on TV who looks like me or speaks like me or speaks like a member of my family or my neighbors. The very first Sesame Street album was not Ernie and Bert. It was Roosevelt Franklin.

It's actually a great soul record. Questlove, who I interviewed and wrote the forewords to my book Sunny Days, said, When I was a little kid watching Sesame Street in Philly and I saw Roosevelt Franklin, it was like the sun coming out. It was so huge and validating. My name is Roosevelt Franklin. Yeah, oh he's Roosevelt Franklin. That's all right. You see, it's Roosevelt Franklin. He's out of sight.

And Roosevelt Franklin knows his number. Was Roosevelt also controversial when he was introduced back in the 70s? Roosevelt Franklin was controversial out of the box and in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect. It wasn't because there was maybe a reactionary element watching and saying, we don't like this black Muppet, this black character. It was more the bourgeois black people who worked at the Children's Television Workshop, which produced Sesame Street. Children's Television Workshop had some black executives and staff members who objected to Roosevelt and felt blindsided by Matt Robinson's creation of Roosevelt Franklin because they thought that he was too street, that he didn't represent an aspirational ideal of what Black American experience is.

And so Joan Ganscooney, a white woman, had to listen to both sides of this argument, and she ended up siding with the bourgeois contingent who said Roosevelt does not send the right message. So Roosevelt was on for a good run. He was on for a good five years of the show, but he was phased out because of those objections. So they get rid of Roosevelt Franklin eventually. Do they introduce any other characters with like really distinctive race? No, there's a really long dry spell where they really avoid the very proposition of it. It really wasn't until 2010 that they even started to go there. They had a song sung by what they call an anything Muppet, which is just a generic Muppet, but who is a Black girl

with curly hair and brown skin. She sang a song called I 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. And it's an anthem about loving your curly, kinky hair if you're Black. And this song really caught on. And that was already 11 years ago. But, you know, that was the beginning of something. But it really wasn't until the murder of George Floyd and this reckoning we went through in 2020, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, that the Sesame Workshop doubled down and really got serious about reintroducing characters

that explicitly were Black or other races. And so in 2020, we learned that we were introduced to new Muppet characters, child Muppets named Gabrielle and her cousin Tamir, who are explicitly African-American Muppet characters. How do you know what to do when you hear someone say you're not good enough? Go away.

When someone is not let in because of the color of their skin. The aftermath of all the really ugly anti-AAPI violence we've experienced in the last year and a half during the pandemic, the current Sesame Workshop recognized that there's a need to sort of, again, reinforce this idea that people are seen, people are understood, and it's win-win. So it's not just Asian American kids watching at home and saying, we felt seen. It's also non-Asian American Americans learning about a culture and not otherizing it, but welcoming it. Right. And not everyone loves it. I mean, generally, the buy-in has been pretty good. Oh!

I haven't seen too much backlash. So there is an inherent buy-in when Sesame Street tries something that there wouldn't be if it was, you know, any other cultural institution. But there's always going to be people, you know, and, you know, for example, like on Twitter, the head of CPAC, who's a man named Matt Schlapp, you know, made a whole to-do about, you know, defund Sesame Street just because of the introduction of Ji Young, the Asian-American Muppet character. Again, why introduce race? Why violate the sanctity and innocence of the bubble of childhood? And of course, there are extremely good reasons to introduce race. And it's nothing new. In fact, it's very old. Roosevelt Franklin dates almost all the way back to the show's earliest days. Is it fair to say the show's always been controversial?

Well, the show has never actively courted controversy, but it has always been willing to not talk around race, but to go there. And in the earliest days, you know, Sesame Street caught flack from the left and the right. For example, it was a public television show, and not every state wanted to air Sesame Street. At the very beginning, the state of Mississippi, their public television board said, there are too many Black people on this show that will alienate our viewers. We don't want to air

it. And this made the national news and effectively Mississippi public television was shamed into putting Sesame Street on the air pretty much from the get-go. But that was an example of maybe kind of reactionary white-wing pushback. Yet at the same time, there was left-wing pushback saying that Sesame Street wasn't black enough, or even though it sort of had this urban setting where it was by design meant to look kind of dilapidated, you know, that it was too sanitized, that it presented too much of a Pollyanna-ish view of how different races mixed in this urban setting. And you see to this day that politicians, particularly on the right, like to make hay of Sesame Street and use it as a wedge issue.

I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. But I'm not going to I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money. There's this misperception that Sesame Street, to use Ted Cruz's term, is government propaganda. But when Big Bird told children to get vaccinated against a deadly disease, I said, enough. And I created my own Sesame Street called Cruz Street. It's a gated community. And people use Big Bird as a whipping boy,

whipping bird, excuse me, because he is the most reliable totem, most identifiable proxy for what Sesame Street is. I'm a bluebird that's been dreaming of a rainbow I can follow to that old familiar place I long to see. In a minute, how are you going to be mad at Big Bird? Friendly faces, a smile to greet me, or just a simple hello. How are you?

Oh, without them, I'm so blue. There's only one thing that we'll do to make this heartache end. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Heartache. frame to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the Aura Frame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code

EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM,

a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, Hello there! Today's letter is... Ta-da! The letter T! For Today Explained.

We're back and we're picking up with David Camp. David, tell me, how was Sesame Street funded when it first launched? Sesame Street is an anomaly in the history of television. It really was the only time the federal government went into the TV production business, meaning not just passively funding, but it was an active 50-50 partner in producing Sesame Street in its early seasons. Half the funding came from government agencies. The other half came from philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.

How did that happen? How did the federal government decide to jump in and fund this children's educational entertainment show? Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morissette, when they founded this show, had great timing. I was lucky that my career was formed in an era eager to take on the unfinished business of America, especially the education of disadvantaged children. They had the idea for the show in 66. And though it didn't make it to air until 69, 66 was right in the middle of Lyndon Johnson's administration and his war on poverty, his great society. I propose that we begin a program in education

to ensure every American child the fullest development of his mind and skills. Huge amounts of federal money to improve public education, to alleviate the effects of child poverty. So they tapped into a good moment when they could get all manner of funding and goodwill

to underwrite Sesame Street and make it a reality. And how long does that glory last? In the early 70s, Richard Nixon becomes president, and he's actually also pretty supportive of Sesame Street. But he says, no, I'm a Republican. We're not going to keep funding this show. And so they recognized at Children's Television Workshop, the production entity behind the show, that we're going to have to pivot to other forms of funding. had become such a cultural juggernaut that they could make a lot of money from things like record albums and soft toys, you know, of Ernie and Bert and Grover and Cookie Monster. Who's giving everybody the giggles? It's Tickle Me Elmo. When your child tickles him, he talks, laughs, and his whole body shakes. So there was this huge revenue stream that kind of kept them going for a long time without the government.

How long does that last? I mean, honestly, that lasts well into the 80s and 90s because you've got ancillary rights coming from not just record album sales and toys, but suddenly, whoa, VCRs. So you got VHS tapes and later on DVDs. So there's this stream of funding that just keeps, keeps Sesame Street going until it doesn't. Things like DVD and VHS tape sales dry up because of streaming. You also have the atomization of the child viewing audience because going along with streaming is this idea that suddenly kids have a lot more choices than Sesame Street. So suddenly Sesame Street, you know, is fighting for audience share and it's fighting for revenue and it needs a suitor to come in and save it financially. And that suitor comes in the shape of... of? HBO, and now we'd call it HBO Max. In 2015, they made a deal with HBO basically to sustain

Sesame Street. And by the way, at a much smaller scale, they only do around 35 new episodes a year, which are half an hour long. In the old days, the old public government funded days, they did 130 hour long new episodes per season. But nevertheless, HBO says, hey, we'll come in. We'll underwrite this show. Now, the optics of this are problematic because if you think about Sesame Street's origins, it was originally conceived to be a show for the least fortunate and advantaged kids in America. Suddenly, a premium cable, and now we'd call it a premium streaming service, has the rights to Sesame Street. And first-run episodes are on HBO exclusively for nine months before they kick over to PBS, where they're viewable for free. Does that change how accessible it is to all children across the country, across the world?

In 2015, when the HBO deal was first announced, it felt like, you know, Sesame Street was getting more restrictive about who could watch its original programming, its first run shows. But over time, in the six years since, I think that there's been a relaxation of that for two reasons. One, that Warner Media's funding as HBO's parent has allowed them to pursue a new slate of programming, an expansion of programming, you know, that allows them to do other shows under the Sesame Street banner beyond the flagship. The other thing is, is that Sesame Street is not just going out through HBO. It's going out through PBS and it's still getting public-private partnerships where, you know, they're getting it to people all over the world by whatever means necessary.

So like in refugee camps, they're doing it through apps and through WhatsApp, you know, any way possible. What does Sesame Street look like around the world? You know, we have a Syrian refugee crisis. And so they created a new version of Sesame Street for Syrian refugee kids called Alon Sim Sim. So if you are a Syrian refugee kid living in a camp, you receive this version of Sesame Street that actually has Muppet characters who are experiencing what you're experiencing. There's a Venezuelan version because they also have a refugee crisis. You know, there's a South African version that caught a lot of right-wing flack some years back because they introduced an HIV-positive

Muppet because they had an AIDS and HIV crisis in South Africa. Yeah, we are having a street party here in support of everyone who is HIV positive like me. You know, they're kids being born with HIV. And so they replicate this model all across the world for a variety of circumstances. So just to be clear here, is there any government money currently going towards funding Sesame Street? Only a tiny fraction of money that underwrites Sesame Street comes from government agencies. It is overwhelmingly Warner Media's money and that of private benefactors. But that hasn't stopped people from getting very mad when Big Bird goes and gets his

vaccine. All right. So today we cancel Sesame Street. Big Bird has a Twitter account now, by the way. He tweeted that he'd just gotten the vaccine despite having natural immunity due to the fact that puppets don't have respiratory systems. Exactly. There's this kind of a hangover idea that Sesame Street is still a government-funded show. But it's an easy way, because it airs on public television,

for someone like Ted Cruz to say when Big Bird gets vaccinated, government propaganda for your five-year-old. Is it a public health thing? Yes. Are they aligning with people like Dr. Fauci? Has Dr. Fauci appeared on Sesame Street? Yes. But Sesame Street is not government propaganda. But it's always going to be tempting to cynical politicians to make hay of this. Maybe, you know, maybe it works to get lots of retweets, but I wonder, you know, apart from being a useful, you know, political whipping post, do kids still watch the show the way you did growing up, the way Questlove did growing up, the way I did growing up?

Do kids still have the same connection to Sesame Street when there are so many things to choose from on so many devices and so many platforms? Sesame Street will never command the huge viewing audiences it once did. That's just not going to happen again. But that's not going to happen for any TV show except a live sports broadcast. And so the question is, is Sesame Street still relevant? Sesame Street will always have a cultural cool and it has this reservoir of goodwill. Who would turn down an invitation to Sesame Street? A lot of people feel like it's their aspirational apex, you know, like, yeah, I won the Oscar. I won the Grammy. I won the Tony, but, but no, no, it was when Sesame Street called

and asked me to be on the show. And it's funny because the people there's, there's people who are obvious like Billie Eilish and Lin-Manuel Miranda. It kind of makes sense. But then you have Robert De Niro and Martina Navratilova coming on the show. You're like, what? But for them, it's a big deal too, because their kids are watching. And they say like, this is as huge as it gets.

My kid's favorite show wants me on it. Oh, wonderful. One, two, tip tops on your shoe. One, two, tip-tops of your shoe. One, two, apples. This one's for you. David Camp's the author of Sunny Days, the children's television revolution that changed America. Halima Shah is the producer of this episode.

I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. Numbers sound so much better. I'm Sean Ramos for Um, it's Today Explained. The number two!