I took 6 years and fit as much as I could in a 2.5 hour musical.” The implication: the oppressive weight of these complex individuals somehow justifies jettisoning acknowledgement of the reality of their failing as slaveholding white supremacists. In response to such criticism, Miranda generously conceded his limitations, while still defending his melanated whitewash of American history: “All the criticisms are valid,” he tweeted, adding, “The sheer tonnage of complexities & failings of these people I couldn’t get. As Ishmael Reed pointed out in his 2019 critique of Miranda’s Hamilton, in addition to glorifying its titular slaveholding hero and the Founding Fathers as a whole, it fails to present the voices of the “Native Americans, slaves, and white indentured servants” they victimized, voices Reed himself would subsequently include in his play “ The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.” The colorism controversy surrounding the lack of Afro Latinx representation in the Hollywood version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights is recent but not new. This implies that the stories of people of color are not, or as British author Nikesh Shula has observed, “White people think that people of color only have ethnic experiences and not universal experiences.” Evidently so do some people of color. Their answer, however, seems to be that as artists it is not their mission to tell the stories of people of color but to tell universal, human ones. Of course, this assumes these agents of cultural production want to tell these stories. Real life, if not yet reel life, is already kaleidoscopically diverse. Hollywood and Broadway need to realize that you can tell the stories of people of color without whitewashing or blackwashing them. It doesn’t need to be further muddied with the added confusion of race switching. The problem here is that America’s (and Britain’s and much of the world’s) grasp of history is already mired in myth and misrepresentation. This has meant that the opportunity to tell stories, both historical and fictional, focused on black lives has been squandered in a quest, as Quixotic as it is contradictory, to convince ourselves that color doesn’t matter, and that issues of race and racism can be engaged without confronting them honestly and directly. Meanwhile, in the real world, the lives of people of color, particularly those of darker hue, are erased.īlack lives matter, especially, it seems, when they are transmogrified into white ones – or light ones. A Ta-Nehisi Coates-penned black Superman reboot. Afro British Regency aristocrats in Bridgerton. If you are trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?”Ī black Anne Boleyn. “The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid. –White actor Mark Stanley on the casting of black actress Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn “It was about this being the right person for the job, rather than what we as a society might perceive as the ‘right look for the job.’”
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