Critics say the lines are in essence a how to manual for robbing Chinese and other Asian American homes and businesses. Protest organizers have already successfully gotten YouTube to remove the video. They have circulated a petition to ban the song from public media and have YG investigated by federal authorities. The petition has already garnered the necessary 100,000 signatures for it to go before the Obama administration.
“I do believe this was a hate crime,” Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen told reporters. The comments were applauded by observers glad to see authorities not mincing words when talking about the mass shooting. The FBI and the Department of Justice quickly announced that they have opened up a hate crime investigation for the shooting. The only issue is: South Carolina is one of only five states in the nation that doesn’t have a hate crime law on its books.
Images, and the words that oftentimes accompany them, have a tendency to take on lives of their own. The mustache sported so famously by Hitler represents many things. It represents fear, violence, extermination, destruction, hate. The very fact that someone would use an image as loaded as that of Hitler to make a statement about an economic policy is irresponsible. That being said, the policies born from economic theories have had huge impacts on the lives of millions upon millions of people.
Hamilton uses what some might call colorblind casting, but it goes beyond colorblind. The show is intentionally diverse, meaning white historical figures are often portrayed by minority actors as a point of course. This is particularly poignant in the wake of the George Floyd protests. One might be able to overlook the fact that a Black man is playing Thomas Jefferson, were it not for that fact that Jefferson ran a plantation and owned slaves. That juxtaposition is jolting.
William Schreiber earned the 2019 Rising Star Award from the Women’s Fiction Writers Association for his novel, Someone to Watch Over. The book was adapted from his original screenplay, which has won or been nominated for many competition awards, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ prestigious Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, as well as numerous Best Screenplay awards at film festivals throughout the country.
