Sesame Street changed my life.
A kid in my neighborhood in Hamburg, American I think, owned taped US versions of Sesame Street, very unusual for us who had never even seen a tape recorder before. And then he introduced me to a new world. I was six or seven and didn’t understand the language but was thrilled by what I saw. People of all colors and ethnicity lived on a street together, gleefully. Puppets caused a ruckus and seemed not to behave very well. It was a free world and I wanted to live there. I learned my first English words with Kermit. Watched breathlessly that friends could fight and like each other, like Ernie and Bert. Couldn’t wait for the next episode. The children’s program started airing a year later in 1970 on Germany TV in a German dubbed version.
Germany was occupied after WW2 by the winning countries and British, French, American and Russian military troops were stationed in four zones. Safe from good radio music programs and occasional military training flights over the countryside, we were not really aware and only Germans close to the military bases were in touch with the soldiers. In the late 60s, about one million Turkish guest workers were invited by the German government to help the German economic boom and spread all over German industrial centers, mostly keeping to themselves. There were hardly any foreigners or immigrants in Hamburg when I was growing up. I knew one girl with a German mother and an African father, and in high school were several kids of Iranian traders. To me Germany was chalk white then.
In the 80s things changed. A cousin of my mothers married an African doctor and raised her three beautiful, multiracial kids in a small Lower Sachsen town. Political asylum seekers came to Germany from Africa and Middle East and together with the German kids of the Turkish guest workers slowly mixed up the German whiteness a bit.
At the same time, I arrived in Los Angeles, in my twenties and for the first time on American soil. I was struck by the diversity. So many cultures and languages spoken and cuisines to taste, it spun my mind. It was fantastic. But also LA had erupted in gang violence, black youth turning against each other on turf wars rather than attacking the system that actively oppressed them. In the 90s Affirmative Action, a governmental policy finally granting blacks fair access to education and opportunity, sought to annihilate the still whipping tail of slavery. Like Native Americans found a way to make money with casinos, African Americans started to gain money and power through music and sports, but were still marginalized in main stream society and races rarely mixed privately and socially then.
It took another twenty years to make Sesame Street’s utopian world, where people of all colors lived, loved, worked and laughed together, a reality in the US. The new millennium started on a liberal foot with a multiracial American in the White House, a fact that alienated US conservatives so much, that they had to nominate the ultimate antidote for the next election: a privileged white male, utterly self-absorbed, entitled, racist and chauvinistic. I don’t know the statistics of public opinion during the 50s, the last decade of racial segregation, but the sentiment fostered by the current American president seems as bluntly segregational as it was then (interesting paper from 1969 on the changes of public opinion on segregation link). And his supporters seem not to mind to throw out fifty years of the races growing closer for a ‘Make America belong to the Whites Again’.
This is heartbreaking. Once more human rights are kicked with boots into the sand in the US. The country seems lost in a territorial war between liberals, who lost their Sesame-Street-Land, and conservatives, who resented the decades of not being able to be openly racist. The verdict is still out on if the conservatives willingly voted for that man or if the win was an enormous but unintentional mistake.
I hope and wish. Unfortunately it’s not in my hands and the US will vote in 2020 essentially on if it wants to be an inclusive country or to see things black and white.
