So I'm half-Chinese and half white, and it wasn't until being part of this show — even though I've been in other mixed race casts — that I have been considered an actor of color. Up until now, I haven't been talking about being an Asian-American woman!
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But perhaps I prefer to think about what Miranda himself could have done better, and that’s easy: he could have chosen to dedicate his talents to telling a more revolutionary story—one in which the lives and stories of people of color were foregrounded.
Given Miranda's track record in first breaking into and then reaching deep into the power structures of Broadway, I'm definitely willing to see hold back on saying that "he could have done better." Let's give the man another ten years.
It’s not Lin-Manuel Miranda who first made Hamilton an abolitionist, for example: Hamilton’s biographers have been promoting that myth for generations; Ron Chernow is only the most recent. Miranda would have had to dig deeply and counterintuitively to question it, and that process would assign him a job other than the one he has. It’s fair for non-historians to expect to rely on well-received history books intended for general readers.
Professional historians share the blame for historic inaccuracies in Hamilton, the musical.
But then he shakes your hand and says “Be true”
Poignant words in passing from man to his future son-in-law.