Sesame Street Memory: Lucy Liu | #ThisIsMyStreet
Lucy Liu shares a heartfelt memory of learning to speak english by watching Sesame Street and finding a family within the cast. Share your favorite Sesame Street memory on social media with #ThisIsMyStreet!
I was five years old when Sesame Street first aired in 1969. I remember coming home from kindergarten and watching the show in the afternoon, and then, the next day, kids talking about what Oscar had said over snack time (he was the first character for children I saw that was allowed to be grouchy and not be “bad”).
Sesame Street celebrated a neighborhood that was multiracial and multicultural. When I was in preschool, that was my reality, too. Though I did and still do have a lot of cultural racism to unlearn, the extent to which I was able to learn how to be friends and neighbors with a diverse peer group was supported by Sesame Street. To be clear, this is why conservatives have wanted to destroy it from the beginning.
The Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television briefly banned Sesame Street in 1970 with the flimsy excuse that Mississippians weren’t ready to see racially integrated neighborhoods. And that happened in a few other Southern states, including one where the owner of a local NBC affiliate chose to air it, for free, no ad revenue, because he thought people were ready for it — or needed to get comfortable with it. And these state ETV commissions eventually relented after getting a lot of negative publicity.
