My Thoughts on Hamilton

Hamilton is a musical that wants me to relate to the founding fathers by dressing them in black and brown skin while they rap and sing their history to a strange (sometimes wonderful) straddle of Hip-Hop and theatre music. It wants me to empathize without knowing their views on slavery or their participation in it. It consistently calls Alexander Hamilton an immigrant, conflating the experience of a white man moving from one British colony to the next, with the Latinx experience of moving from one country and cultural experience to an entirely different (and racist) one. It throws around the term “Freedom” and because it is a black or brown face saying it, I’m supposed to see the fight for freedom and segregation, and the founding father’s fight for freedom from the British Empire as the same (it is not).

And if I do relate, and feel a patriotism that I, as a Black woman, may not have felt before, it is a false patriotism because it isn’t based in the fullness of truth. It doesn’t tell me that manumission (mentioned in one of the earlier numbers of the musical) means giving freedom to the slaveholder to choose whether or not he would free his slaves (because slavery= wealth, and Hamilton above all believed property rights were most important). That manumission is not emancipation or abolition.

It doesn’t tell me that Hamilton was ambiguous at best in his views, and if challenged would choose money and being amongst wealthy white society over abolishing slavery (It does tell me that he thinks about slavery but doesn’t have time to deal with it, though). It doesn’t tell me this because it fears that I won’t be able to empathize with the “real” Hamilton. It doesn’t believe it can tell a compelling story from that. It spins his desire for money, wealth, and comfortability into aspirational longings for legacy.

But I’m asking for too much, right? “It’s just a musical! We shouldn’t look to art for history!”

These excuses minimize the work in order for it to be enjoyed. It does not need to be excused and minimized to still be enjoyed. I felt the acting, singing and (some) of the rapping was phenomenal. Some of my favorite songs were “Satisfied” and “Wait for it.” Musicals are powerful and deeply engage our senses, and the emotions felt within that experience are valid. That doesn’t mean the work isn’t problematic.

Claiming that we shouldn’t look to art for history is wrong and privileged. How many of us did not know about the Central Park Five until we saw When they See Us? Why did Ava DuVernay (who also shared this sentiment on twitter) create a fictional account of this experience when an excellent Ken Burns documentary, The Central Park Five already exists?

Because telling a story, creating a narrative, places us in the present of these moments. We are there, with the characters and historical figures, and we feel what they feel. We understand, often in a deeper way than reading facts on a page. Art is the stepping stone before we enter into the world of biographies and documentaries. To say that one should solely depend on non-fiction books, documents and documentaries for truth is to deny access to history to so many people, and to deny the power of art.

Lin Manuel Miranda understood this, which is why he chose to have minorities depict these historical figures. He wanted us to step into these identities and see ourselves. To feel what they felt. He wanted white people to be forced to engage with Black and Latinx faces and hip hop culture under the safe banner of Broadway and white American history.  In this desire he romanticized these figures and instead of turning his audience to the truth with the musical, he unwittingly turns them away from it, believing in a Hamilton that doesn’t exist; believing that we need to ignore or erase pieces of a person in order to empathize with them; and believing that Black and Latinx people can only revel in white American history to feel American.