Captain Bringdown: Dismantling White Supremacy, the Broadway musical Hamilton edition
Hoo doggy. My young-adult son Sam and I have both been reading “Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion,” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. We stumbled upon it separately, which of all the varieties of literary serendipity, is one of the most delightful. Book kismet: I love it.
I love it when Sam and I read the same book because we pause mid-paragraph to talk about what is blowing our minds.
Yesterday I was putting away laundry when he flopped onto my bed, heaving a sigh. “Dang, Mom. This book is sure changing how I feel about Hamilton.”
Indeed.
One of the upshots of consistent engagement in the project of dismantling white supremacy is that you can consistently be a total buzzkill, especially in white spaces.
Hashtag White Privilege
Like when our (white) friends and fam were sitting around a firepit in our front yard New Years Eve, quoffing yuletide beverages and shooting off fireworks in the street.
A cop car pulls up. Cop doesn’t bother getting out of his car. Rolls down the window, says, “Hey folks. We got reports of shots fired.”
“It’s just fireworks,” we say.
“Oh. Cool. Carry on,” he says.
That’s all. None of us got citations or warnings or arrested — or shot at.
And we can then chuckle and be super relieved.
But maybe you feel you must say, “HASHTAG WHITE PRIVILEGE!” to your friends and yup then you’re basically Captain Bringdown, but we all also know: ain’t that the truth.
Anyhoodle. I digress.
Captain Bringdown: Hamilton Edition
Hamilton.
Whoo lordy.
When Hamilton hit Broadway my nerd radar pinged because … history and music and dancing and Broadway! What’s not to love?
It’s hard to remember, but my goodness. It was a whole thing.
The O.G. cast performed in the Obama Whitehouse.
It stormed Broadway, swept the country.
It even made me feel a tad … patriotic?
Like yeah, maybe the incipient U.S. was “young, scrappy, and hungry.” Maybe the racial diversity of the cast was a good example of our racial diversity as a country.
Soon it was our constant soundtrack in the car. Sam and I were both TOTALLY into it. Loved it. Knew every word of the soundtrack and the mixtape, saw it at DPAC twice when it finally toured, got the T-shirts, the whole deal.
And it is GREAT theater. Stipulated.
BUT.
It’s kinda … well it’s built on a house of lies, dude.
So without further ado, and with help from Sam, here are:
FIVE LIES THAT HAMILTON, THE MUSICAL TELLS ABOUT HAMILTON, THE PERSON:
There are more than five. But five is a good round number. For details, see the first chapter of Not a Nation of Immigrants.
Hamilton was not an immigrant. He was a British citizen of the British colonies. He wasn’t poor. He was a member of the elite ruling class.
Not only was Hamilton not an immigrant, he and his fellow Federalists were staunchly anti-immigrant. They opposed liberal immigration policies. They wanted to bar immigrants from holding elected office. And that’s not all. Hamilton wrote in favor of the forceful expulsion of immigrants without trial or hearing.
Hamilton was not an immigrant … he was a settler-colonizer. What’s the difference between an immigrant and a settler-colonizer? “… settlers come to build something completely new, and, crucially, to drive out or kill the people already there, taking their land and resources….” Immigrants are people who emigrate to a place and to some degree or other, acculturate to that place. They follow the rules and guidelines of that place. They do not displace, start a new government, engage in violent genocide, or steal land from previous inhabitants of that place.
Hamilton was not anti-slavery. He certainly was not an abolitionist.
That song where Hamilton talks about being an apprentice in an import / export business? That’s Beekman and Cruger, which supplied slavers and traded slave bodies.
The Schuyler sisters? Who seem super cool and feminist and have the best songs? And “their perfume smells like their daddy’s got money”? They did have money. From the trading and owning of chattel slaves. And after he married in, Hamilton bought and sold chattel slaves on behalf of the Schuyler family.
The end of the musical has Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, singing, “I speak out against slavery…” and about how she gets momentum for building the Washington Monument. Um… whut? The Washington Monument was built with slave labor. George Washington owned slaves. How is this speaking out against slavery, exactly?
The multiracial casting is a dang lie. It’s cool to watch a musical where LaFayette is Black and Washington is Black and Jefferson is Black and Burr is Black and Hamilton is Latino. It’s all chill... until you remember that, uh, the reality is these were all white, moneyed, elite men — and most of them owned slaves. The musical does not show us any enslaved Black or Brown folks. None. Zero. Nada. It’s all too easy to come away from the musical feeling pretty great about a multicultural nation of young, scrappy, hungry immigrants — when the reality is the U.S. was a settler-colonial project by wealthy white men who owned slaves and were attempting genocide against Native Americans and who started a violent revolution against Britain because they were tired of paying taxes.
Hey. It’s okay to like music and musicals and art and all. Of course it’s okay. But taken as a whole, Hamilton is … starting to make me feel more than icky.
Hamilton shows us a fantasy version of a mythical Obama-land America, which was mythical even at the time. And the political reality of the time of Hamilton is in fact a lot more in line with “Trump wins the 2024 election” than a fantasy post-racial multicultural America.
Oy. Have I mentioned that the upshot of educating ourselves is that a lot of things lose their gloss?
Hey, you know what never loses its gloss?
A disco ball. That’s what.
And friendship. Shiny happy friendships. Those are pretty great, too.
Also, birthdays. I had one this week and I sure do love celebrating birthdays.
Blessings on your heads. Have a slice of birthday cake for breakfast.
XOXO
P.S. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR RENEWING YOUR PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS! It means the world to me. Truly. Thank you.
P.P.S. Further reading and resources:
Book: NOT A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS: SETTLER COLONIALISM, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND A HISTORY OF ERASURE AND EXCLUSION, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Available wherever books are sold, and also digitally to borrow on Hoopla.
Book: AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
Interview: PUBLIC THINKER: ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ ON HOW TO UPEND SETTLER COLONIALISM. On Public Books: a Magazine of Ideas, Arts, and Scholarship. September 7, 2022
Docuseries: EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES. HBO.
Documentary: LAKOTA NATION VS. UNITED STATES. Hulu or to rent.
Happy Belated Birthday, Jen! <3.
A belated Happy Birthday. A big yippy for Disco Balls, Friendships and cake. I’ve a hunch that Sam made it?