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Look, I love Rent with the intensity of a small town queer teen in the 90s, but it is the pinnacle of self-righteous white person 90s multiculturalism & therefore problematic as hell.
90s white person multiculturalism: "I don't see race!" Through the lens of 2019, it is clear that a) only a white person can claim not to see race, & b) not seeing race means demanding that everyone conform to your standards of whiteness, which c) is a gross form of erasure
...but in the 90s, it was d) considered to be Peak Enlightenment by white people, including Jonathan Larson, who wrote Rent as All White People But Some of Them Happen to Be Black (which again is basically how we white folks did multiculturalism in the 90s).
In Rent, we have a group of 20 & 30 something Gen Xers grappling with questions of how to stay authentic to one's true (artistic, queer, otherwise marginalized) self in the face of capitalism & conformity, which, you know, hashtag privileged people problems, but that's okay...
except our (Jonathan Larson's & by proxy the audience's) understanding of what "selling out" looks like is from a non-intersectional upper middle class white person perspective with literally zero curiosity about the unique struggles faced by the characters of color.
Specifically, Rent treats Joanne & Benny as white people who happen to be black, & so disparages them for committing the ultimate sin of selling out without ever considering the fact that selling out might mean something different to POC than to rich white kids from Connecticut.
So let's look at Joanne (who is PERFECT and who deserves way fucking better friends). She is a queer black woman who has had to work harder & better for every single accomplishment than any of her white friends, but she's a lawyer so everyone's like "lol what an uptight bitch."
Even though her friends happily use her lawyer skills whenever they come in handy (which is OFTEN), the rest of the time they're shitting on her for being so organized & employed or whatever. She's even a public interest lawyer with friends at Legal Aid! Nope, still a sell-out.
And as if it wasn't hard enough for Joanne to grow up as the daughter of wealthy black professionals with political ambitions (in the 70s & 80s, mind you), to be one of the only black girls in her prep schools & ivy league education, she was also a lesbian!
Does any of Joanne's white friends--or, most significantly, her white girlfriend--ever exhibit a single shred of curiosity about what Joanne's girlhood was like? The unique challenges she faced as a queer black girl navigating primarily white, hetero, male spaces? NOPE.
It's because they DON'T SEE COLOR, guys.
And then the show treats Joanne's parents as complete monsters for asking Joanne to perform cis-femininity ("wear a dress! and a bra!") at her mom's upcoming judicial hearings, because again, Rent refuses to consider the unique challenges these characters might be facing as POC.
Joanne is maybe 28 (?) in 1996, which means she was born in 1968. That means her parents were born somewhere between the late 30s & mid 40s, yeah? The first black woman to become a judge in the United States was Jane Bolin, who was sworn to the bench in 1938.
So it's 58 years after the first black woman judge ever in the US, & less than 30 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and yet Rent treats Joanne's mother as an ignorant harpy bitch for asking her daughter to wear a damn bra to her judicial hearings.
Again, this position would make sense if Joanne & her parents were white (though let's face it, even then it would be harder for a woman to be sworn to the bench than a man, so our 90s multiculturalism is performing not only racial but also gender erasure, hooray).
To sum up: Joanne is the best, 90s multiculturalism was problematic as hell, and all the white characters are assholes, especially Maureen. FIN.
