Why White Kids Need Hamilton More Than Ever

Every morning when my son opens the dishwasher for his morning chores, his daily tribute to the Broadway musical Hamilton begins in song: “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman …” Our family will remember 2020 for three things: the COVID-19 pandemic, the intolerable killing of African American George Floyd at the hands of police, and Hamilton. My two White teenagers have memorized nearly every word of the musical, and they are not unique among their peers.

I’m not complaining. The musical, which retells the familiar story of the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton with a cast of strikingly racially diverse actors, does a lot to break down damaging ideas about race. At the very least, the musical’s broad representation of people of color uproots mainstream messages in historically White societies about who’s capable of what. Hamilton goes well beyond the Hollywood trick of slapping characters of color into stories told by and for White people; it is told by and for a much wider audience. The show trains my kids to appreciate hip-hop and other predominantly Black cultural elements, sparking conversations about how to move beyond cultural appropriation to appreciating contextualized calls for racial justice.

In short, the narrative of Hamilton trains White kids to engage with people of color not with pity or disdain but by coming alongside as learners and co-conspirators.

There’s something else interesting underlying the musical that’s perhaps harder to put a finger on. As an anthropologist who has studied the ways people facing some of the world’s starkest racialized discrimination handle unemployment, I notice it. The story seems at first glance to present the usual American narrative that hard work is all that’s needed to go from rags to riches. But on closer inspection, it is clear that these characters understand their lives as more than hard work. They need to fight and struggle to rise up against their circumstances. They need to hustle.

In 2020, as many White Americans wake up to the reality that humans are neither invincible nor handed equal odds, the online release of the movie version of Hamilton this July couldn’t come at a better time. Privileged White kids growing up in America today, in particular, need to learn who has hustled and why so they can better understand their own entitlement.

As the son of Puerto Rican parents, raised in New York City, the show’s creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda shares in common with his protagonist a journey from lower-class Caribbean obscurity to New York American fame. In the Hamilton story, people fight seemingly insurmountable problems, from inequitable education access to political power struggles. Miranda offers an account of this nation’s founding where odds and opportunities aren’t all equal, change won’t happen without a fight, and there’s no guarantee the heroes won’t get shot in the end.

Social theorists Cheryl Mattingly, Jerome Bruner, and others have emphasized that humans make sense of their world not just through static facts and ideologies, but through narratives. Among the most influential narratives are those that tell us how people can and should achieve the good life. Parents, schools, worship communities, friends, art, advertising, and media all pass along messages about how to make life good.

The hard work narrative is not working. It’s a myth.

In the famous words passed down across generations of Black Americans, “You’ll have to work twice as hard to get half as far.” Racism is real, and so is classism, sexism, ableism, and heterosexism.

The narrative in Hamilton takes the neoliberal narrative and fires it back at itself, saying: We’ve been told to work hard and then been denied the fruits of our labor, but watch us fight together in our way and get there anyway. In her study of working-class people of color in New York City, anthropologist Katherine Newman explains that Black youth adopt “an intensified version” of the American middle- and upper-class fixation on hard work because “forces of inequality, racism, and birthright have interfered with pure merit.”

This try harder narrative shows up all around the world where people face discrimination and obstacles at a societal scale.

For much of my children’s life, we lived in South Africa, where I studied South African responses to unemployment, described in my forthcoming book The Laziness Myth (due to be released December 2020). South Africa ranks among the highest in the world for unemployment, inequality, and entrenched racism. In 2020, amid pandemic unemployment, a recession, and a jolting national awareness of racial injustice, America has a lot in common with the South African situation.

In my research, Black South Africans often described their path to the good life as “hustling.” As one young man explained, a hustler “tries to make change for a living” and “keeps up the struggle.” Hustling means being, like Hamilton, “young, scrappy, and hungry” and never throwing away a shot. Hustlers are more creative, more subversive, less likely to take the system for granted, and more willing to rip it open at the cracks. Hustlers can spot when “there will be a revolution in this century,” and they respond with Hamilton, “Enter: me!”

Hustling also means learning to face death, a skill dominant culture doesn’t teach most privileged White kids. Many Americans freeze in terror of COVID-19 in part because they have accepted the modern biomedical narratives promising that technology makes them invincible. Hamilton’s narrative is honest: “Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints.” With Hamilton’s awareness that “where I come from,” some don’t “live past 20” comes a readiness to “make this moment last” and “gladly join the fight.”

The musical’s plot turns on the tension between Hamilton’s scrappy hustler narrative and Burr’s preference to “wait for it.” Mid-musical, Burr’s transformation begins when he realizes that he’s “got to be in the room where it happens.” In the next scene, he’s openly campaigning, “chasing what I want.”

Burr admits to Hamilton, “I learned that from you.”

Shifting from waiting to chasing is central to Black Lives Matter and other civil rights movements. Malcom X’s motto, “by any means necessary,” was a call to chase after justice. Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr., from a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, chastised White people for their waiting narrative. He penned, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Like Burr, listeners might well learn from Hamilton’s chase-after-it drive.

No single work of art, even if kids memorize its every word, is going to override a lifetime of comprehensive racial learning. As Hagerman notes in White Kids, the foundation of kids’ racial understanding is often set through their parents’ “bundled” decisions like school, neighborhood, and extracurricular activities. As this year throws more hardships at American society than many of us have any idea how to handle, we should think consciously about the narratives we’ll use to guide children.

As children come of age in America 2020, White families would be wise to look to narratives told among those who have long been aware of the unequal playing field of systemic injustice and those who never took for granted easy employment or a long life. They need to regard Hamilton not just as a night of entertainment, a cultural curiosity, or a display of genius. It is a guidebook to join alongside the creative energy of hustlers, immigrants, and all those ready to “get the job done.”