Chester Pierce

Pierce in 1972 (Photo By David Cupp/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Dr Chester M. Pierce (1927-2016) is the Black American psychiatrist who came up with the term “microaggression” and helped design the children’s television show “Sesame Street” (1969- ). He even worked with NASA to help bring American and Russian cultures together on the Space Station. He was a Harvard professor.

In October 1947 he made Time magazine when he was a student at Harvard: he became the first Black college football player to go down South to play against a White college – when Harvard played the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Pierce did not think it was a big deal:

“I don’t recall a hint of anything racial on the field. I remember nothing different in that game from any other I played for Harvard … It was no big deal and took no courage by me.”

The 22,000 fans were shouting racial slurs and obscenities, waving Confederate flags and singing “Dixie”. The hotel would not let him stay in the main building and would not let him go through the main entrance of the dining room.

One of his teammates: Robert Kennedy.

In the 1960s White psychiatrists over and over again had failed to take racism seriously and were in fact enabling it. Then:

In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead and cities across the US burned. Pierce said he and fellow Black psychiatrists “anguished in our grief for a great moderate leader” and:

“As we listened to radio reports and called to various sections of the country for the on-the spot reports in inner cities, our moderation weakened and our alarm hardened.”

And so they founded Black Psychiatrists of America, making Pierce its first president.

He was not just a psychiatrist by then but also a professor of early childhood education.

In 1970 he told them:

“Many of you know that for years I have been convinced that our ultimate enemies and deliverers are the education system and the mass media. We must without theoretical squeamishness over correctness of our expertise, offer what fractions of truth we can to make education and mass media serve rather than to oppress the black people of this country.”

To that end Pierce worked with PBS to create a new television show for children. The show was designed to help poor children, especially Black and Brown children, to learn their numbers and letters. But he wanted them to learn something more: that people of all races could live together and be equal. So the puppets and people on the show came in all colours – a White shopkeeper, a Black schoolteacher, etc. He wanted an anti-racist message to counteract the racist messages being pumped out by much of the rest of US television.

That show became “Sesame Street”.

 

Hidden curriculum: As Loretta Long, who plays Susan on the show, put it:

“‘Sesame Street’ has incorporated a hidden curriculum … that seeks to bolster the Black and minority child’s self-respect and to portray the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural world into which both majority and minority child are growing.”

Pierce Peak in Antarctica is named after him.

– Abagond, 2019.

Sources: mainly UNDARK and The Undefeated.

See also:

• Don Cornelius
• microaggression
• The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr
• The assassination of Robert Kennedy
• Sesame Street
  • Karli
• Jim Crow
• The Confederate flag
• Charlottesville riot

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