“Hamilton” — for all its progressiveness — is
not immune to this reexamination. It looked at
America’s past and raised its own statues. But it
skirted the nation’s white supremacist origins,
despite three minority actors playing white,
slave-owning current or future presidents.
Thomas Jefferson is represented as the one bad
Founding Father who did participate in slavery.
“Your debts are paid ’cuz you don’t pay for labor,”
Hamilton teases Jefferson in a cabinet rap battle.
“We know who’s really doing the planting.”
Yet George Washington’s ownership of slaves
isn’t mentioned at all and Hamilton’s role as a
slave owner has been whitewashed. “Hamilton”
in 2020 crashes into Black Lives Matter and
comes off less powerful, less revolutionary.
In the show, Miranda’s line: “Who lives, who
dies, who tells your story?” was a plea to put
Hamilton back into the history books, to
reclaim this lost Founding Father. The genius
of “Hamilton” is unchanged — how history
remembers and changes.
But in 2020, the question of how we tell stories has
shifted in meaning. Who tells our story? That would
be white people — and the show’s lens might
scramble the deck but it’s still about elite, white
males. “Hamilton” once asked us to look again at
the birth of America, but it’s hard not to think that it
may soon face its own kind of reckoning.
It didn’t do all the work.
“Hamilton,” a Disney Plus release, is rated PG-13
for gun violence and adult themes. Running
time: 161 minutes. Four stars out of four.
MPAA Definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material
may be inappropriate for children under 13