Sesame Street “I Am Somebody” Segment with Jesse Jackson
By Guest Contributor gwen, originally published at Sociological Images
In the early 1980s the Reagan Administration engaged in an active campaign to demonize welfare and welfare recipients. Those who received public assistance were depicted as lazy free-loaders who burdened good, hard-working taxpayers. Race and gender played major parts in this framing of public assistance: the image of the “welfare queen” depicted those on welfare as lazy, promiscuous women who used their reproductive ability to have more children and thus get more welfare. This woman was implicitly African American, such as the woman in an anecdote Reagan told during his 1976 campaign (and repeated frequently) of a “welfare queen” on the South Side of Chicago who supposedly drove to the welfare office to get her check in an expensive Cadillac (whether he had actually encountered any such woman, as he claimed, was of course irrelevant).
The campaign was incredibly successful: once welfare recipients were depicted as lazy, promiscuous Black women sponging off of (White) taxpayers, public support for welfare programs declined. The negative attitude toward both welfare and its recipients lasted after Reagan left office; the debate about welfare reform in the mid-1990s echoed much of the discourse from the 1980s. Receiving public assistance was shameful; being a recipient was stigmatized.
Abby K. recently found an old Sesame Street segment called “I Am Somebody.” Jesse Jackson leads a group of children in an affirmation that they are “somebody,” and specifically includes the lines “I may be poor” and “I may be on welfare”.
(Originally found at the Sesame Street website.)
I realized just how effective the demonization of welfare has been when I was actually shocked to hear kids, in a show targeted at other kids, being led in a chant that said being poor or on welfare shouldn’t be shameful and did not reduce their worth as human beings. Can you imagine a TV show, even on PBS, putting something like this on the air today? Our public discourse at this point says that being on welfare is shameful, and that those receiving it in fact aren’t “somebody.” They are dependents, lazy loafers, and their kids are just additional burdens on the state; they don’t have the same rights to dignity and respect as other citizens, and they certainly shouldn’t expect to get it.
Of course, the totally confused looks on some of the kids’ faces are hysterical.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Lola wrote:
and now the mortgage crisis has been blamed on giving home loans to undeserving minorities
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 11:58 am ¶
somebody wrote:
Every time I see this, I smile, and then I cry.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 12:37 pm ¶
Melanie wrote:
Love that Jackson poem! I have it up in my office as a reminder to all who enter.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 12:40 pm ¶
Phil Deeze wrote:
As long as welfare has a “black face” on it, there will be white folks and white politicians that will play that card and never be called on the carpet.
And, my personal favorite is when a white person will say “Back in my grandfather’s day when we came over from (insert name of European country), there was no ‘hand-outs’, affirmative action or welfare to freeload off of, we hacked our existence out of the ground with our two hands unlike you people….” You’ve heard this attitude before.
Some people will stop at nothing to villainize black people that are on welfare in order to make themselves feel superior. It’s really quite pathetic. I can empathize with black folks and other people of color on welfare if only because I know, as a person of color, how mainstream white society could possibly “see” me or relate to me being in that socioeconomic tranche.
As if other black folks of means, however limited, don’t pay taxes and, by definition, support social programs like welfare. Hello? I think it’s quite arrogant of some white politicians to play the card as if white people/taxpayers are the only one who pay into the kitty.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 3:16 pm ¶
Rosa wrote:
Wait, Phil, you hear people saying there were no handouts for European immigrants? Really?
That’s insane. Have these people never heard of the Homestead Act?
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 4:15 pm ¶
Big Man wrote:
My man Phil!
Yeah, this could never happen today on mainstream television. Never, ever, ever…
Things have changed.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 4:49 pm ¶
RJG wrote:
It makes me sad to realize that something like this would be treated as an attack against American values that FOX would use as a reason to defund PBS. Glenn Beck would sob, demand people think of the children, and somehow make it involve George Soros.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 5:37 pm ¶
dianne wrote:
A friend of mine counters this message this way….
She says, “So, you think that….if a woman is middle-class, it’s bad if she doesn’t stay home with her kids. And if she’s poor, it’s bad if she DOES stay home with her kids. Which is it??? Which is it???”
She is more fierce than I am.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 6:09 pm ¶
Keith wrote:
I remember every assembly our principle made us repeat Reverend Jackson’s poem, but she put her own spin on it. And at the end she would say all right you may be seated and we would repeat that too. Good times, we also sung “Lift Every Voice and Sing” aka the black national anthem. Shout out to PS 147 Ronald McNair School.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 6:27 pm ¶
N D wrote:
I revisited this the other week and loved it then as I do now.
I grew up during the welfare “facelift” of the 1990’s under the Clinton administration and my mother participated in the welfare-to-work program. She was able to utilize this tool in order to get off of the books, illustrating that perhaps, with some support, transcendence is possible (the ethics behind the program).
On the flipside, I would be short-sighted not to see that the initiative took my mother outside of the home during my formative years working multiple low wage jobs AND attending classes/internships. It’s hard to say what might have been sacrificed for this shift but I definitely took alot from my time being a “welfare case” and seeing my mother hustle in order to get a bit of respect from those so far removed from our experience and indifferent to the emotional effects of bearing the burden of callousness towards the welfare recipient.
I can only speak from child-like admiration for my mother’s actions and the deep sadness and anxiety I experienced as being marked by class status. It wasn’t being “poor” that hurt me but being considered undeserving that was most traumatic.
Anyway, in the end I can say “I am somebody” and that I always have been.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 10:26 pm ¶
Phil Deeze wrote:
@ Big Man,
Yeah. It’s the same Phil Deeze from Dwil’s site. I grew up with kids on welfare in the old neighborhood in DC. My dad was a DC cop. But one thing I was never EVER allowed to do was look down on those kids. I was taught that it wasn’t right, and I’m going to teach my son that, too. That’s how I plan to end this silly stuff in terms of what I can control.
My parents taught me that just because someone doesn’t have money doesn’t necessarily make them “worth” less as a human being. And ESPECIALLY a child that didn’t grow up with a lot of money in the household. We shouldn’t need Jesse Jackson to tell these kids that they are somebody, bottom line.
If the people that look down on folks like that had the least bit of home-training, they’d understand. But I guess, for them, I’ll have to write it in crayon, like usual.
Posted 30 Oct 2009 at 11:55 pm ¶
Somebody wrote:
My own affirmation would be: “I may be too sick to work but I am somebody. I may be on disability but I am somebody.”
Posted 31 Oct 2009 at 1:26 am ¶
ashlynn wrote:
Oh goodness. Does anyone remember this song?
“I am a promise,
I am a possibility. I am a promise, with a capital P…I am a great big bundle of….POTENTIALITY!
And I am learning to hear my inner voice,
and I am trying to make the right choice.
Cause I can be anything, anything I want me to be.”
We sang this every morning in elementary school, right after our motto, “Knowledge is power. Knowledge is great. THAT’S what I appreciate. I do my best, I tow the line, I make that ‘Knowledge is Power’ MINE!”
Young people need more of this in their lives. As a child I used to say that motto at the top of my lungs, and it would give me the boost I needed to try my best every day in school. Even out of school, it stayed with me…positive encouragement is mental, emotional, and when critics and racists and jerks in general try to tear children down with hate, you must build them back up twice as much.
Posted 31 Oct 2009 at 11:52 am ¶
Leah wrote:
@dianne– I LOVE your friend, and I don’t even know her!
@ashlynn– How great that you mentioned this song! I do some work with a school in Detroit and one of the 2nd grade teachers (who is a first year teacher) taught her kids this song. They’d sing it along with a tape she had, and I got teared up every time. Something about little people, so bright and beautiful singing that song just does me in!
Posted 31 Oct 2009 at 2:35 pm ¶
eric daniels wrote:
I remember the battle of shame that started with kids on welfare in the 70’s because I was one of them poor kids. Reagan’s message was so nasty and racist that Black Kids were even more cruel to those poorer kids who couldn’t afford those extra nice things like clothes or shoes and made life a living hell for many a poor kid and not to mention the white teachers and students we had to deal with being bussed in 1975-1976. We were treated like trash and it made me a totally cyncial person when it comes to race to no one’s surprise.
I also remember watching that segement of Sesame Street of Rev. Jackson ’s “I am Somebody” and while postive, it seemed to me as a then 10 year old that White Conservative America was declaring war on African- American working- class and poor people and now after 30 something years we finally are fighting back albeit too late.
Posted 01 Nov 2009 at 5:01 pm ¶
m. wrote:
This, along with the “Indians Don’t Talk Like That!” animated short and the guest appearances of Buffy Sainte-Marie and a bunch of others, is in my YouTube Favorites! Sesame Street was great. Children deserve better than the “programming” targeted towards them today, it’s terrible.
Thank you, Abby K./gwen! The kids in the video are adorable and crack me up.
Posted 01 Nov 2009 at 7:33 pm ¶
saxton wrote:
“poor” doesn’t come in ONLY one color
Posted 06 Nov 2009 at 8:18 am ¶