Thread by @AzieDee

Have y’all been to the Heights?!? I lived there and looked like everyone else. People kept coming up to me to hug me and say they knew my mother. The neighborhood is Dominican (as in the same island as Haiti 🙄).

The irony of her last name in this instance is not lost on me.

https://twitter.com/colbertlateshow/status/1404980532069478403

But of course, I didn’t get why we needed Black and Brown people playing the a bunch of colonizers, so maybe I’m just weird.

I was especially pissed at the show’s focus on John Laurens as a martyr with an unrealized dream of recruiting Black Revolutionary soldiers when THERE WERE BLACK REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIERS (9,000 on American side - 4% of our troops) and they were completely ERASED from the narrative!

No mention of the Iroquois in the creation of our Constitution or the development of our democratic system, either. Also many of the people fighting in the initial skirmishes in Boston were Native, like Crispus Attucks who was half Wampanoag.

And Washington was successful in war because he used the tactics he had seen tribes use in the French and Indian war. He talked a lot about this. He also engaged Native sharpshooters and bowman like my ancestor Mason Collins.

Not saying you can encompass *everything* in one show. This is a vast, and complex history. BUT.

I don’t understand how you write a show abt the American Revolution w Black/Brown bodies, but completely erase the contributions of actually Black and Brown people in that history.

And then you write a show that takes place in Dominican-ass Washington Heights and just happen to not cast anyone dark.

It’s bias. We all have it in some form. White supremacy is like a virus. It makes us sneeze out some weird shit. End metaphor.

That was a bit reductive.

I didn’t get why we needed Black/Brown people playing a bunch of people who willfully colonized and enslaved them.

I did like tht it positioned our current struggles against oppressive powers, with that of these white godlike figures. Subtly, tho.