Last weekend, the New York Times ran an excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda under the headline: “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Weathered the Storm.” The “storm” in question was started by Ishmael Reed in an essay for CounterPunch rebuking Miranda for his staging of Hamilton, a play venerating the writers of the Constitution, including its infamous 3/5s clause, with Black actors.

Typically for the New York Times, CounterPunch goes unmentioned in the piece and Reed, one of the most celebrated Black writers in world literature, is dismissively referred to as a “left-wing provocateur.”

Imagine Thomas Pynchon being referred to as a “left-wing provocateur” based on his essay “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts,” which traced the origin of the riots to systemic violence against Blacks by the LAPD. (By the way, Pynchon gives a shoutout to Reed in his masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow.)

For some commentators, the power of “Hamilton” remained undiminished, perhaps even augmented. It wasn’t “just a classic American musical,” the culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote; it could “also act as an antidote to white fear.” Others, though, contended that the musical’s inclusive casting masked the complicity of all the Founders in establishing the system of racial injustice that the Black Lives Matter movement opposed. The left-wing provocateur Ishmael Reed reposted a piece he’d written when the show premiered, titled “Black Actors Dress Up Like Slave Traders … and It’s Not Halloween.” This time, he found a more receptive audience for his critique.

The author of the biography, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner (who teaches English and Theater at Portland State University–haven’t met him and don’t want to), quotes Miranda as saying he didn’t include the debate about slavery in Hamilton because it “didn’t advance the story.”

But Pollack-Pelzner completely misses (or intentionally avoids) one of Reed’s main points, which was that while Miranda portrays Hamilton as an abolitionist, the co-author of the Federalist papers was himself (through his wife, Elizabeth Schuyler) a slave-owner.

Whether Miranda’s reputation “weathered” Hurricane Ishmael or was sunk by it, remains to be seen…But my money’s on Reed.

The post The NYT, Hurricane Ishmael and the Reputation of Lin-Manuel Miranda appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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