padawankorra:

I’m so tired of watching oblivious, white hamilton bloggers ignore and argue with Facts™:

• lmm’s a non-black person with no right to claim or use n-word. he said it, uncensored, in the Hamiltome while quoting Daveed, a black man referencing a rap lyric written by another black person. it was censored in the text of the book.
• hip-hop has roots in the Latinx community as well as the African-American and Caribbean communities, but he’s made millions off a predominantly black art form without telling the stories of any black people, and in some cases, actively erasing them. Cato, a black man kept in bondage by Hercules Mulligan, heavily assisted Mulligan’s intelligence work.
• also, “No one else was in / The room where it happened” as if Jefferson, who “arranged the menu, the venue, the seating,” didn’t have his slaves serving whatever was consumed during the “Dinner Table Bargain”?
• in the end, Hamilton continued the dangerous trend of romanticizing the founding fathers. some of these men were actual rapists, all were racists and cowards. they founded a country built on the exploitation and abuse of black people. there is nothing wrong with an interest in this historical era and even these historical figures. that is, unless you’re denying the facts of what they did and how their actions still affect millions today.
• why say Hamilton in the musical is bisexual and not throw in more than a “Laurens, I like you a lot”? depending on your interpretation of surviving Hamilton-Laurens correspondence–censored by Hamilton’s son after his death–there is historical evidence for feelings on Hamilton’s side at the least.
• the closest we ever get to mentioning Washington owning slaves is “turn n’ go back to plantin’ tobacco in Mount Vernon” and, in the live show, him nodding and stepping back when Eliza mentions slavery in the finale.
• slavery’s used as a tool to show the goodness of Hamilton and those aligned with him. the worst example of this is when Hamilton refers to the Revolutionary Set as “a bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists.” Mulligan (and Burr) owned slaves. Hamilton rented them for his own purposes, allowed slave-related ads in the NY Evening Post, and bought them for immediate family like Angelica.
• the Schuylers were a slave owning family. this didn’t bother Hamilton enough to court someone aside from Eliza. that, or it’s consistent with how any anti-slavery sentiment he harbored was secondary to his social station and political agendas.
• Laurens was the only real abolitionist, historically, and even he opposed forced manumission out of a belief in property rights.

as a black person, I appreciate Hamilton as a piece of art that has dynamic, multi-dimensional roles meant for people of color. as a writer and fangirl, I especially love thinking about its creation closely mirrors that of fic au: identifying with a character while reading the source material, going “but what if so and so?”, and then putting one’s own spin on it.

but art, fanfiction (which is famed for the research dedicated writers do about everything but people of color) and other types of transformative works included, do not exist in a vacuum. they’re part of the real world. a world where antiblackness, American history, glorification of the Founding Fathers, the downplaying of slavery, the erasure of historical black figures, and heteronormativity are real things that hurt real people.