So, I am way behind the popular culture times. That’s what happens when you move from a city to a small town, have a child and become a stay-at-home mom. I don’t often get out to do things like see Broadway musicals, giant concerts or other significant cultural events. I wait for most movies to come out on cable, and then, I only get to watch bits at a time. Sometimes, I only know things are important because I see people I value embracing them. Sometimes, I only know there’s a story worth “reading” because people I love value it.
That’s the case with the musical “Hamilton.”
Just as it was getting ready to open, I watched a story about its inception on “CBS Sunday Morning.” I wasn’t sure it was for me, but because it was such a new take on where we were as a nation more than 200 years ago, I knew it was going to be important. It was a new way of telling America’s story, and of course, Alexander Hamilton’s story. It became a runaway hit and a cultural phenomenon.
I didn’t get to see it until today, so I had intentionally avoided listening to any of the music because I didn’t want to hear it out of its intended context. Stories are important to me. Music is important to me. And music tied to stories can’t live separate from each other until you have had the chance to hold them together in your heart. It’s just how I am.
“Hamilton” struck a chord for so many when it opened on Broadway, but for me—seeing it the first time in my living room—it struck a chord I may not have seen before. Or at least It wouldn’t have struck me the same way.
I am one of the whitest people on the planet. I understand my privilege, and I treat it a little like an alcoholic who needs meetings. I’m never going to be free of the burden of my privilege until we somehow find a way to crush it. Until then, I am forever going to be in an accountable state of learning, and trying to crush my unintentional tethers to it.
As one of the whitest people on the planet, I have to understand that I was raised in a manner that may not have been overtly racist, but was also not overtly inclusive or open. Music is a lifeblood for me, but even though I like many different genres of music, there is one way in which my scope is decidedly narrow. I didn’t hear any black voices on my parents’ stereo or on their car radios. My universe of music was starkly white, and it still is. The reason that matters is because I understand that the story of all of the music I do love couldn’t be told without the voices in the music I never really heard. There are characters missing from the story—vital ones.
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| Pixabay Image |
The story of our American independence is forever being written and rewritten, but there are parts of it that remain static—parts of it we all know. Everyone knows how the Revolutionary War turned out, so it’s not really spoiling anything when I say that the scene in “Hamilton” where we win really impacted me in an unexpected way.
The men—the white men—who declared our independence and hammered out our democracy have always been accepted as great men, because we view them from an exclusively idealistic vantage point. We grow up being taught they were great men, and we believe that story, because their names are on the papers, their names are in the books, their artifacts are in museums, and their existence is memorialized, sanitized, white washed, and polished. It’s true that their names being white washed doesn’t change many of the ideals they may have thought they were striving for. If not for them, we would probably be living very differently. But the truth is, we don’t always get their complete stories. We don’t get the flaws, the misdeeds, the ignorance, the mistakes, and the atrocities that also belong in their stories.
The part of the story we don’t understand is that having great ideas doesn’t necessarily make the people who have them great. We foist greatness onto people not because they are profoundly good, but solely because of their shining moments—their great ideas. We disconnect all of their other moments from those ideas, and we scrap everything else.
In third or fourth grade, I had to do two research papers about two of our presidents. My assignments were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. I think my only sources were encyclopedias from the school library. It’s been almost 40 years, so my memory of the instructions are hazy, but I distinctly remember that I wasn’t asked to write about anything bad or boring about either of these men. Thomas Jefferson being a slave owner, and Andrew Jackson being a genocidal psychopath never came up. I wrote about Thomas Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence, and Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British in the War of 1812.
I didn’t know I wasn’t reading their whole stories.
Back to “Hamilton.”
As I sat watching George Washington and his troops turn the world “upside down,” I felt something so unexpected. I felt a grief that drove me to tears. Out of nowhere only one thought occurred to me as I watched so many cast members of color breathing life into this history—our history. What about their stories? What about the stories we will never get to see on a Broadway stage, in a book, or in a movie? What about the black lives and people of color who were sacrificed for this dream—for our nation? What about their stories? Who were the black men who helped us fight for our independence, not knowing if they would ever share in it? Who were the black men and women whose blood our freedom is built upon—every bit as much as the blood of Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson? Who lives, who dies—who tells their stories?
And from then until now, there are so many of those untold stories.
I believe in our universe we find ourselves at crossroads over time. We find ourselves at a fork in the road, and our choices either change everything, or keep us in perpetual traction. I don’t know why the time is now that after 400 years of systemic racism and oppression we find ourselves at a crossroads again—the same one where we must decide to either change everything and build what the idealism in those deeply flawed great men may have intended, or continue to give lip-service to their words and allow the word “equality” to remain meaningless verbiage in a system that could have been the example instead of a failure.
When I say these things, it may seem like I don’t love my country. I don’t have a defense against that perspective. I’m not built for forced or contrived allegiances to anything. I love the idea of my country. I love the promise of my country. I understand terrible mistakes and grievous atrocities have been made all over the map and all over the timeline. But I am only responsible and accountable for what happens in my own place and my own time, and the only allegiance I accept is to being on the right side of history—the right side of this story.
And our story is incomplete. Our history is buried in the regalia of time, propaganda, wishes, and unfulfilled promises. The stories we know about our black brothers and sisters are separated from our real history, and that is at least part of why our story is incomplete and our promise is unfulfilled. Yes, we have Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X. But what about all of the others we won’t know?
We have had so many chances to complete our history and fulfill our promise. There have been marches. There have been sit-ins. There has been a president singing “Amazing Grace” in grief over a perpetual divide manifested, once again, by bloodshed. There have been lives taken for no other reason than white versus black. There have been, and are Americans calling for the completion of a chapter that has gone on for too many pages. There have been courageous black men respectfully kneeling to remind us that some pages of our story still tell of sanctioned violence and oppression that happen, even today. There are voices speaking on behalf of the stories we will never hear demanding that we live up to our promise.
Who lives? Who dies? What will it finally take for us to understand and tell our whole story? What will it take for us to be willing to erase the lies, accept the truth, write it down, and then pick up the pen and write the first page of a new promise that includes all of the stories?
Until all of those stories are told—until every word, every character, every life we have not lifted up in fulfillment of our own promise matters—our history and our nation will be a work of fiction.
