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If you're planning on watching Hamilton this weekend, this is a friendly reminder that it is both an earth-shatteringly excellent musical and a fundamentally flawed depiction of American history that glosses over the fact that the founding fathers were colonizers and enslavers!
When I first heard the show, I felt immediate discomfort and confusion about its ahistorical insistence that Alexander Hamilton would have been an abolitionist had he "had more time." But all of this goes way deeper than that.
Lots of folks have informed my thinking on this, including @ishmaelreed (content warning: unflinching discussion of the brutal realities of slavery, including sexual assault): https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/21/hamilton-the-musical-black-actors-dress-up-like-slave-tradersand-its-not-halloween/
James McMaster zeroes in on the fact that the show absolutely doesn't pass the Bechdel test and endorses a totally unacceptable bootstraps immigration narrative https://howlround.com/why-hamilton-not-revolution-you-think-it
Public historian colleagues have also engaged with Hamilton's anti-Blackness. @intersectionist asks "Is this the history that we most want black and brown youth to connect with—one in which black lives so clearly do not matter?” https://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article/38/1/89/90687/Review-Essay-Race-Conscious-Casting-and-the
(I have access to The Public Historian and can send you the PDF of the above article if you want it!)
Lyra Monteiro interviewed in Slate: https://slate.com/culture/2016/04/a-hamilton-critic-on-why-the-musical-isnt-so-revolutionary.html
Annette Gordon-Reed engages with Monteiro on the @ncph website: https://ncph.org/history-at-work/hamilton-the-musical-blacks-and-the-founding-fathers/ as well as in Vox: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/9/13/12894934/hamilton-debates-history-race-politics-literature
Conservatives and neoliberals love the show, partly because casting people of color in these roles assuages any guilt that overwhelmingly white audiences might feel about venerating enslavers and colonizers: https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/272964-obama-hamilton-is-the-only-thing-dick-cheney-and-i-agree-on
When you know what we all know about both George Washington and Barack Obama vis-à-vis human rights violations, this video (that was deeply meaningful to me when I first saw it, and remains so in many ways) is downright disturbing:
Of course, this is all part of a larger conversation about racism in musical theatre, and an important point from @feeltheheath: we don't just need Black bodies in musicals, we need Black stories. https://medium.com/@heathcliffsaunders/what-i-think-about-when-i-hear-that-broadway-is-racist-afa1b012a8b
Hamilton did so much for this larger conversation about racism on Broadway, and opened doors for more diverse casting on the Great White Way (an apt moniker if there ever was one), but we should demand more.
We need to move beyond simply casting people of color in roles traditionally played by white people, and direct attention (and, crucially, funding) to BIPOC playwrights, directors, performers, designers, musicians, stage managers, and crew members.
We need to tell Black stories, not just use people of color to glamorize stories about white people.
Of course, so much of this is tied to capitalism. Here's a killer line from Ishmael Reed's The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda: “Do you think American Express hired you because they want a revolution?” https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ishmael-reed-haunting-of-lin-manuel-miranda-hamilton-play-review/
Is "Wait For It" one of the greatest songs in contemporary musical theatre? Yes. Do I belt along with "Helpless" every time? You bet. Does "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story" absolutely wreck me? Yes.
Can we separate the musical's genius from the fact that it is incredibly flawed and incredibly destructive in its sympathetic portrayal of deeply evil people? No.
I'm not telling you not to love Hamilton. I love Hamilton.
I'm just saying that you can't look past all of this and let the show convince you that the founding fathers were anything but enslavers who built a nation with white supremacist values and systems that continue to inflict violence on our BIPOC siblings.
The reason Hamilton had so much time to write, after all, was because of wealth created by enslaved peoples' labor.
Need me to be less of a buzzkill? Stay tuned for another thread called Why Nora Adores Hadestown, Which Aligns Much More Closely With Her Politics
Adding this other recent article by @andrewrchow to the thread, which cogently synthesizes a lot of what I've shared here: https://time.com/5858556/hamilton-disney-plus
Another great thread sharing the history that we don't hear about when we talk about the founding fathers: https://twitter.com/VioletRiotGames/status/1278719012797636608
More greatness from @feeltheheath: https://mobile.twitter.com/feeltheheath/status/1278865628871434241
