What if Lin Manuel made a play about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution instead of Hamilton?

They were contemporaries, died pretty close to one another. The former led a Black rebellion that shocked the Western world, the latter was complicit in slavery...

In a play about Toussaint he could have wrestled with themes of leadership, power, loving one’s home all while offering a subtext of liberation and challenging the basis and legacy of slavery and white supremacy. In a play about Hamilton we got, at best, a white liberal fantasy.

When I tweeted this I actually wasn’t suggesting LMM actually do a play about Toussaint as much as I was making the point that he *could have* made it about Toussaint, Hamilton’s contemporary, and he did not. I can see how folks thought I was suggesting he make that play though.

Put differently, I wanted to highlight how by choosing Hamilton, when there were other available contemporary figures with more radical agendas, LMM weaved a story that caters to white liberalism. That was an artistic and historical choice when other options were available.