Was Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving racist? Just look at Franklin, critics say
You’re a good man, Charlie Brown, is how the song goes.
But some who tuned into “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” on ABC this year are begging to differ.
Just look at the way the rest of the group treats Franklin, the only black friend invited to Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving picnic, they say.
It’s subtle, but it’s also separate and unequal, they say. Can you spot what they’re talking about?
As Linus, seated at the head of the table, begins to regale the crew with the tale of the first Thanksgiving in the New World before their feast, Franklin sits alone on one long side of table in a lawn chair. Four friends, including Charlie Brown and Snoopy, crowd in along the other side, seated in sturdier chairs.
One viewer suggested boycotting the lighthearted special in solidarity “until they sit some people on the same side of the table as Franklin.”
Another struggled to reconcile being “woke” in 2018 with the “things that I did not notice as a child.”
Others simply wondered why Franklin had to sit alone, or compared Franklin’s situation to the 2017 movie “Get Out,” a horror/comedy movie in which a rich, white family tries to abduct and trap their daughter’s black boyfriend in the psychological “Sunken Place.”
But a cursory look at the history of Charles M. Schultz’ “Peanuts” comic series shows that Franklin’s lonely seat on one side of the Thanksgiving table wasn’t Charlie Brown’s version of the Sunken Place.
Franklin’s first appearance in the comic strip came on July 31, 1968. And Schultz inserted Franklin into the group on purpose, to encourage racial integration, after a retired teacher wrote him, pleading with him to put a character black children could relate to in the comic strip that was so adored at the time the civil rights movement was making advances, according to The Washington Post.
The fact-checking website Snopes has debunked the myth floating around social media that Franklin’s treatment at the Thanksgiving table meant that the characters’ creators were racist.
On Franklin’s official “Peanuts” bio, Schultz described the boy as “thoughtful” and notes that he can “quote the Old Testament as effectively as Linus.
“In contrast with the other characters, Franklin has the fewest anxieties and obsessions,” it continues.
This story was originally published November 23, 2018 at 11:31 AM.
