In the wake of recent Black Lives Matter protests, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multi-Tony-winning “Hamilton” has fallen under scrutiny over its glorification of slave owners.
Miranda, 40, took to Twitter on Monday to respond to those critics.
This wave of criticism stems from the buzzy July 3 release of the show’s movie version on the streaming service Disney+, more than a year ahead of schedule, bringing with it a much wider audience.
On Sunday, Tracy Clayton — host of the Netflix podcast “Strong Black Legends” — tweeted that “ ’Hamilton’ the play and the movie were given to us in two different worlds & our willingness to interrogate things in this way feels like a clear sign of change.” In her thread, which earned 32,000 likes, she goes on to say that “ ’Hamilton’ is a flawed play about flawed people written by an imperfect person that gave my flawed and imperfect little life a big boost when i needed it most … but i do appreciate the change this illustrates & will be following the convo’s evolution.”
“Appreciate you so much,” Miranda tweeted on Monday morning in response to her tweet. “All the criticisms are valid. The sheer tonnage of complexities & failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut. I took 6 years and fit as much as I could in a 2.5 hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game.”
Go here to read the rest. The Left always eats its own. By the standards of his time Hamilton was an abolitionist, in spite of his peripheral involvement with slavery as a sad reality of the time in which he lived. However, the Left is not interested in nuance or reason.
If Hamilton was great– even in blackwashed, genuflect-to-the-Progressive-altar, musical form– then there’s something which they can be measured against.
Didn’t see it. Don’t want to see it. No interest.
Still sad to see something that made some folks happy get turned on, and so quickly.
things are really heating up.
I LOVED IT!!! and thought it was interesting that no one is calling for whites only to play white “roles,” even though it seems like the opposite is happening. And I am embarrassed to say that I actually had to look it up to see if Aaron Burr wasn’t white. My white privilege is obviously showing because I don’t see how anyone can hate the musical/movie. Why didn’t they say something 5 years ago?
Never was interested. If the opposite was to occur such as flipping the race role in Roots it would be considered racist. No thanks.
BTW, I hope Tracy Clayton never catches a showing of Bing Crosby’s Holiday Inn.
Haters got to hate everybody.
In 2015, I read a book, “Washington and Hamilton,” by Knott and Williams (all I have in my notes). One of Hamilton’s early friends when he hit NY was Hercules Mulligan – what a name!
The Miranda Hamilton bears minimal resemblance to the historic Hamilton. Let’s not look into his LGBTQ street creds.
Hamilton was seriously OK, maybe he woulda coulda been great. He had to be good if Washington employed him on his staff. Plus, he was instrumental in ratifying the Constitution and ingenious in his efforts to set the Republic on firm economic and fiscal ground – funded the war debt, the First Bank of the US, etc.
This woke criticism (parochial, myopic, unsophisticated, bone-stupid as always) isn’t new. Though, the earlier ‘beeves’ had far more basis in actual fact.
Miranda is an artiste not a historian. It’s entertainment if you’re into lefty feel-good, total fabrications, which is all the woke left has, anyhow.
The criticism go back at least to 2018.
I don’t have the source. But here goes.
“Reed, whose play had a recent reading in New York and who is raising money for a four-week production in May, is part of a wave of “Hamilton” skeptics — often solitary voices of dissent amid a wall of fawning attention — who have written journal articles, newspaper op-eds and a 2018 collection of essays, “Historians on Hamilton.”
Miranda’s glowing portrayal of a Hamilton who celebrates open borders — “Immigrants, we get the job done!” — and who denounces slavery has incensed everyone from professors at Harvard to the University of Houston to Rutgers.
They argue that Miranda got Hamilton all wrong — the Founding Father wasn’t progressive at all, his actual role as a slave owner has been whitewashed and the pro-immigrant figure onstage hides the fact that he was, in fact, an anti-immigration elitist.
“It’s a fictional rewrite of Hamilton. You can’t pick the history facts that you want,” said Nancy Isenberg , a professor of American history at Louisiana State University who has written a biography of Aaron Burr and is the author of “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.”
To be fair to Miranda, for hundreds of years even to this day thousands of heretics and assorted theologians have done the same to Jesus Christ.
Truth in the Liberal lexicon is how you feel at the moment.