Sesame Street has created a new muppet that will be appearing in the newest episodes and will now be a part of the Sesame Street cast. A new puppet named Ji-Young, who is Asian American, will be added to the new episode appearing on Thanksgiving Day. 

“She’s a musician, she plays electric guitar, she’s a girl of the very modern American fabric,” said Alan Muraoka, who is Japanese American and owns the fictional Hooper’s Store, told NBC Asian America. “She recognizes the culture through her relatives — her grandmother, through her mother — and through the food she eats and loves.”

The inclusion of this character is to defeat Anti-Asian movements and the whole racism situation against all Asian people alike. It’s to show children that everyone is the same and all of our features as humans should be welcomed. The show has attacked racism before by showing children real life problems in ways they can understand it. They even had an episode which included a young Filipino American girl named Analyn who had been teased about her eyes. 

“Your eyes tell the story of your family. They show where you came from, and how you came to be,” the cast sings in a song together in the episode. “The color, the shape and the size should always make you proud of your eyes.”

The kids of this newer generation should understand about racism and how it’s not okay. The idea of these episodes is to help children understand that their features are what make them unique. These kids need to understand that these are real issues the world faces and they need to know about these features because they might face it one day the older they get. Sesame Street has been making episodes facing real world problems like the Black Lives Matter movement, the damage from Hurricane Katrina, and the pandemic. 

“Especially in the last two years with the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, we’re at a very critical time that we need to talk about these issues that are both sensitive and hard at times,” Muroaka said.

Muroaka has already been receiving a lot of good feedback from many Asian Americans of all ages from the new muppet. In the past he even had an Asian American in his 20s that interviewed him who said “I totally bawled when I watched the segment because of stuff that has happened in my past.” It is shown that kids of color have a higher self-esteem from seeing characters or people just like them in shows and movies. Television exposure impacts a lot of children of color nowadays so the experience of watching a popular cartoon character that is just like them picks up their self-esteem instead of affecting their experience badly. 

So thanks to the Sesame Street cast, their inclusion of characters like Ji-Young will help show a lot of young Asian American kids that they should be happy from how they look and who they are. This new puppet will make history as the first Asian American muppet to join the cast of Sesame Street.