Grover, Brother

For the past week or so I've kind of been testing out a theory I've had for a long time. Well, I guess it's not exactly a theory per se. It's just something I've always assumed without even giving it much thought. And recently when the subject came up I was shocked that others disagreed with me since it has always made so much sense. So here it is:




Grover from Sesame Street is black.

Don't let the azure furriness deceive you, if you were to transplant the Muppets into the real world complete with corresponding ethnicities, Grover would no doubt in my mind be African-American. And I completely admit that I have no idea why this is true. I have been and will always be the whitest person to roam God's good Earth, but I have never thought of Grover as not being black. So imagine my surprise when my (typically) rational coworkers vehemently disagreed with me, calling Grover everything from "white" to "Mexican" to "Armenian". No, no, and no. As one of my few agreeing peers stated (and I paraphrase): "Grover being black is like Bert and Ernie being gay. It's not acknowledged, but you still accept it as true."

I suppose the overarching question here is, am I really crazy? Was there something wrong with my four-year-old brain that would make me transplant human ethnicities onto characters with seemingly nonexistent social identities? Or did Frank Oz have some sort of covert Muppet-racializing agenda? Is there really a monster at the end of the book? We may never know the answers, but I think we're heading in the right direction.