Five-year-old Wesley Walker and his father Elijah Walker are officially new additions to the Sesame Street cast in an effort to address racial issues.
According to Time Magazine, Wesley and his father were introduced in a video clip posted by Sesame Street titled “Explaining Race,” on March 23.
In the video, Wthe two discussed the fact that Wesley has brown skin. Elmo later arrived to join the conversation with them.
On an Instagram post uploaded by Sesame Street, they explained that the clip is an addition to “The ABCs of Racial Literacy,” a digital content series that is part of “Coming Together,” a racial-justice initiative with an educational framework and curriculum that is meant to teach parents and children how to confront racial injustices in an age-appropriate way.
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Senior Vice President at Sesame Workshop, Jeanette Betancourt, stated: “Children are not colorblind—not only do they first notice differences in race in infancy, but they also start forming their own sense of identity at a very young age.”
She added that “’The ABCs of Racial Literacy’ is designed to foster open, age-appropriate conversations among families and support them in building racial literacy.”
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During the Time interview with Sesame Workshop’s executive vice president of creative and production, Kay Wilson Stallings, she said “People were working remotely. People were feeling a lot of emotions, and it was almost like everyone had the same realization. If not Sesame, who’s going to address this? It felt like everyone had the same, ‘Yes, we’ve got to do something about it, and the first way to address it is that we need to define racism for 3-year-olds.’”
Watch the “Explaining Race” clip here:
According to Edutopia.org, Sesame Street has always been at the forefront of tackling issues.
Rosemarie Truglio spoke to the publication about how the beloved show began.
“Sesame Street is a product of the civil rights movement. In the mid-1960s, Joan Ganz Cooney was a very young producer who was trying to level the playing field, trying to help all children get ready for school—not just the kids who had more advantages and may even have had an opportunity to attend preschool,” she said.
Sesame Street continues to be a groundbreaking educational tool for all children.
