“Cringeworthy” Is the Least of It: White Hamilton Fans Are Racist as F*ck

[Header Image description: the original Broadway cast of Hamilton: an American Musical getting ready to take their bow at the end of a performance. Source: Tampa Bay Times]

This piece contains a CW/TW for a discussions of racist violence, structural anti-Blackness, cyberbullying, and brief mentions of sexual assault (particularly against Black women).

Last Friday, the filmed performance of Hamilton: An American Musical was released on Disney+. Over the last week or so, criticisms of the musical’s historical inaccuracies, problematic casting, and its creator Lin-Manuel Miranda have resurfaced. Other critics focus on the fact that Hamilton and everything surrounding it is “cringe.” One thing that few people discuss, though, is how incredibly racist the musical’s white fans are. As a Black person and a former member of the “Hamilfandom,” I can’t let that go unmentioned.

I spent most of the summer of 2016 on Tumblr, where I had a relatively sizable platform for a seventeen-year-old: at my peak, I had well over two thousand followers. However, as is often the case for Black people online, plenty of followers bring plenty of vitriol — and in mid-2016, I was dealing with plenty of anti-Blackness from white fans of Hamilton.

As a teenager, I spent most of my time in online “fandoms,” or communities of superfans. At the time, Tumblr was the prime host for fandom culture. There are fandoms for anything you can think of, from BBC’s Sherlock to classic rock to manga. I was in many fandoms, including the one for Hamilton.

A major problem with fandom culture is that it’s incredibly and often violently racist. In “bandom” — the megafandom for pop punk bands like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy — I was threatened and even told to kill myself on more than one occasion for pointing out anti-Blackness from fans and the musicians we idolized. In late 2015, I left bandom specifically due to rampant anti-Blackness.

However, Hamilton was a whole different beast. As soon as I listened to the musical’s two-and-a-half hour long soundtrack in early 2016, I was hooked. I immediately followed Hamilton-themed blogs and started reblogging gifs of the musical. After a week or so, I thought to myself: “Wow, the Hamilton fandom is great! It’s not racist at all like bandom.” Boy, was I in for a rude awakening.

The first racist thing I learned about was the slavery fanfictions.

Yep, you read that right. If you don’t know, fanfictions are pieces of literary fiction written by fans for whatever piece of pop culture they’re fans of. Whatever there’s a fandom for, there’s fanfiction for. Fanfictions are often explicitly sexual — including these. White Hamilton fans were out here writing actual fanfictions about actual slavery. Like, literal, actual, forreal fanfictions about chattel slavery. Those are just what I found on the first couple pages of Google. On Archive of Our Own (AO3), a popular fanfiction host site, there are 71 fanfictions tagged as both Hamilton and slavery at the time of this writing. There’s far more on other websites like Wattpad, Tumblr, and Fanfiction.net. I stopped searching for more after this because I almost started crying.

According to one Black former member of the fandom, white authors would create enslaved original characters for their fanfictions or even write “self-insert” second-person works where readers would interact with the fanfiction as if they were an enslaved person hooking up with their owner.

It should be common fucking sense not to write romanticized literature about slavery and the sexual abuse of enslaved people. But even if these white fans somehow didn’t realize that, they were informed of such by Black fans; however, more often than not, they defended the stories. While some of these fanfictions were taken down due to backlash, many are still online.

Another Black former fan said that they were “bullied out of” the Hamilton fandom in 2017 because they told other fans to stop romanticizing the sexually abusive relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. They reported the following incident to me:

“I told them how sally hemmings was a child and Jefferson raped her so its not something to romanticize. 3 different people came at me talking about ‘its just a story’ ‘respect people’s ships’ ‘youre whats wrong in the fandom’ [sic].”

This fan received a death threat for daring to criticize the romanticization of sexual abuse.

Hamilton fans also wrote fanfictions about the cast members themselves in addition to ones about the historical figures they portrayed. Both heavily fetishized nonwhite cast members and the characters they played onstage. White authors played into many racist tropes, including: the “black brute/big scary Black man” when talking about Okieriete Onaodowan and his character Hercules Mulligan; the stereotype of Black men having oversized genitals with Chris Jackson and his character George Washington; and the general hyper-sexualization of Latinx cast members and the figures they portrayed. White fans would often call Miranda, who is Puerto Rican, “papi” in both fanfictions and conversations online.

There are even more problems with Hamilton fanfictions in addition to racism. As of October 2021, over five hundred works in the Hamilton fandom on AO3 were tagged with the warning rape/non-con. (“Non-con” is short for “non-consensual.”) Even more fanfictions do not put this warning because authors downplay the lack of consent and claim that their stories only portray “mild dub-con,” or “dubious consent.”

The fandom has a problem of denigrating Black fans’ perspectives on anti-Blackness. When Miranda — who is not Black — was recorded saying “nigga” in 2016, many fans jumped to defend him, even after Black fans expressed discomfort and explained why he shouldn’t say it. White fans assert their right to cosplay Hamilton characters even when Black fans explain why it’s problematic. (Miranda specifically intended for all of the musical’s major characters to be portrayed by people of color.) White fans also justify all-white productions of the musical and rationalize whitewashed fanart of Hamilton characters; there was even an entire Tumblr blog dedicated to calling out such fanart.

A Black fan had this to say about racism and anti-Blackness in Hamilton fanworks:

“art, fanfiction…and other types of transformative works included, do not exist in a vacuum. they’re part of the real world. a world where antiblackness, American history, glorification of the Founding Fathers, the downplaying of slavery, the erasure of historical black figures…are real things that hurt real people. [sic]”

source: Tumblr

When Black fans called out this bullshit, we — including and especially minors — were harassed and had our blogs reported en masse by white fans who were usually in their twenties and thirties. One Black former fan, who was in the fandom from ages twelve to thirteen, experienced microaggressions and said that they were “too scared to put [their] race out there” due to the fandom’s reputation for anti-Blackness.

Hamilton fans disparage rap and hip-hop culture, as seen in the meme above. Though this tweet was posted by a Black person, similar rhetoric is employed by white fans. They say “other rap music” is too violent and/or misogynistic for their tastes, but Hamilton is more palatable. After Black fans explained why this is racist, white fans got overly defensive.

They ignore or erase the roots of the musical styles in Hamilton, particularly that hip-hop was borne out of the struggles of Black people in the United States and that Miranda was specifically influenced by this music. The musical number “Ten Duel Commandments” is a play on The Notorious B.I.G.’s song “Ten Crack Commandments,” and there are many references to classic hip-hop and R&B songs throughout Hamilton.

One of my friends, a non-Black woman of color, reported that when Congressman Hakeem Jeffries said “if you don’t know, now you know” on the House floor earlier this year, she mentioned that it was a Biggie quote; however, a white person jumped in to note that “it’s also from Hamilton.” Miranda utilizes that line in the musical, but it is a clear reference to Biggie. My friend went on to say:

“the fact that there wasn’t really an appreciation of the fact that the lyrics in Hamilton [were] often borrowed from big hip hop influences felt…wrong to me. Lin[-Manuel Miranda] borrowed that lyric from Biggie and I guess the fandom not appreciating the influences shows that there’s not really an appreciation for the genre…it feels like they don’t wish to actually take time to learn about what the art consists of.”

In addition to these trends, there is a ton of general racism in the Hamilton fandom. In 2017, there was a now-notorious incident of race-faking in which a white American fan pretended to be Asian and defrauded dozens of people out of money. Fans mixed up Black members of the cast who look nothing alike. Fans would infantilize Phillipa Soo — the only Asian-American actor in the original main cast — and lighter-skinned male cast members such as Miranda and Anthony Ramos and the characters they played. At the same time, they hypersexualized Black women and darker-skinned members of the cast — such as Jasmine Cephas Jones and Daveed Diggs — and their characters.

One white fan showed their ass by saying this:

“if you had told me last April that in a year’s time I would be finding a thirty six year old Puerto Rican with a beard [Miranda] adorable and a black rapper with an afro [Diggs] attractive, I would have never believed it”

Source: Tumblr

Racism was so prevalent and accepted that Black fans made a bingo card for it.

The thing is, this stuff isn’t just “crazy fans”; this racism is buttressed by the fact that the musical makes idols out of the founding fathers, who in addition to being racists, were slaveowners/slave traders (yes, including Alexander Hamilton himself) and rapists. This romanticization is not “just a musical” and therefore inconsequential; it allows for (white) fans to do the same not just in the fandom, but in the world. The musical allowed white people to fall in love with and literally stan the founding fathers — no different from what happens in your typical revisionist high school U.S. history classroom. Daveed Diggs, who originated the role of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, had this to say on Charlie Rose in 2016:

“When we meet Jefferson, his house is being prepped by all of his slaves. People don’t talk about that at all…the audience still falls in love with [Jefferson]. And that’s very telling.” [emphasis not mine]

Daveed Diggs (Source: Charlie Rose)

A Black former fan reported that they were told the following by a white fan:

“they [enslaved people] were LUCKY TO BE SLAVES OF SUCH GREAT PEOPLE [the founding fathers].” [emphasis not mine]

Because the musical casts nonwhite people as fundamental figures in American history, white fans have convinced themselves that they can’t be racist because they’re fans of a piece of art made by people of color. However, as we very well know, being in relationship with nonwhite people — or being a fan of a nonwhite celebrity, or thirsting over nonwhite people — does not automatically make a white person antiracist.

I actively used Tumblr from eighth grade through my first year of college; it was then, in 2017, that I left Tumblr, the Hamilton fandom, and fandom culture (mostly) for good. Tumblr and fandom life saw me through my most developmental years. The Hamilton fandom was, no cap, the most racist space I have ever been in. (I went to a private school in the South that didn’t fully integrate until 1976 and I now attend a university that only exists today because of a massive slave sale, so that’s saying something.)

This isn’t just fandom drama. This isn’t just kids being mean or cringeworthy. This is real, violent racism that many people, including and especially children, are forced to deal with mostly on their own. In case you don’t know what it does to Black kids to spend their formative years surrounded by unchecked racism, I’ll tell you: it causes deep-seated insecurity, self-doubt, and self-hatred, just to name a few harmful things. It’s not that I don’t want kids to be in fandoms anymore; I don’t want their niche interests and friends ripped away from them. What I do want is for fandoms to stop deluding themselves about their racial progressivism and undertake and employ antiracist principles.

When people bring up questionable or problematic aspects of fandom life, the prevailing response is “well, fandoms are bad anyway.” While there’s definitely a lot that needs to be unpacked about fandoms and wider stan culture, the response to “I am experiencing violent racism” is never “well, just stop interacting with those people! Boom, racism solved.”

So long as there are nerdy kids, there will be fandoms. So long as people are made fun of for their niche interests, there will be fandoms. It doesn’t matter what you think about the legitimacy of fandom life; the fact of the matter is that Black kids are literally being threatened and told to commit suicide simply because they are Black and demanding respect. Are you telling those kids that you don’t care that they’re facing violence because you think the thing they spend all their time on is foolish?

Racism anywhere is a symptom of the fact that racism is literally everywhere; we can’t just ignore it in fandoms because we think they’re frivolous. Telling an individual to leave a racist institution will not make that institution or racism itself crumble. It takes a lot of work to tear down racist structures, and if we want an anti-racist society, we’re all going to have to put in that work.

There are many, many things wrong with Hamilton: An American Musical that have been discussed already. However, we can’t ignore the fact that one of those problems is the fact that thousands of white fans are utilizing the musical as yet another excuse to go out into the world and be racist. We can’t critique Hamilton without also talking about the fact that its fans are not simply cringeworthy, but actively and violently racist. I hope we can finally have that conversation.