In all my years of watching and loving Sesame Street’s Muppets, it had never occurred to me that they had a race – even as an adult. The Swedish Chef did, I suppose, but he wasn’t a Muppet you’d wear on your pyjamas. The ones that mattered seemed completely divorced from the concept. The best ones – Grover, Oscar, Elmo, Big Bird, Snuffy – weren’t even human. And the human ones could have been anything. What race is Ernie? I guess The Count would be Transylvanian, but he’s also purple. I would have been at least a teenager before I could have placed him in eastern Europe, and even that was a purely intellectual exercise. I never felt any sense of cultural or racial distance from these characters.

I don’t mean this in some “I-don’t-see-race” kind of way. I’m alive to the idea that white is very often the default, so that where race isn’t explicit, whiteness is presumed. But it seems wholly unconvincing to apply that in this case. The human cast of the show is very racially diverse, and the Muppets are in such tight community with them, that it would be forced and artificial to insist that the Muppets must default to being white. I’d be surprised to learn that children internalise them that way. But introduce a conspicuously black or Asian Muppet and you give room for default whiteness to emerge. All the other Muppets suddenly seem whiter to me now.