'Hamilton' on tour YouTube
Disney Plus will soon host Hamilton on its streaming platform. Hamilton is a hip-hop musical in which the Founding Fathers are black. King George III — obviously a villain — is the only white character. “Our cast looks like America looks now, and that’s certainly intentional,” composer Lin-Manuel Miranda told the New York Times in 2015. He said in another 2015 interview: “We’re telling the story of old, dead white men but we’re using actors of color, and that makes the story more immediate and more accessible to a contemporary audience.”
Hamilton’s point isn’t that Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers were black, but it suggests that blacks were the true founders. Many school children will be introduced to the Founders via Hamilton, and they’ll imagine them as rapping non-whites instead of dignified WASPs. The Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Hamilton Education program has already brought 250,000 students to Broadway to see Hamilton.
Many scholars, journalists, and politicians claim that blacks built America. ...