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**JUNE 21, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

The Heights and the Depths

****

Lin-Manuel Miranda's stunning film

**In the Heights** is a miracle of dance and a celebration of
Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, where Miranda grew up.
But Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican descent, has been justifiably taken
to task for a rather bleached-out cast of mostly light-complexioned
Latinos and Latinas. This is in contrast to the real Washington Heights,
a heavily Dominican and Puerto Rican community, where darker-skinned
people are the norm.

Miranda's response was exemplary, and he ruefully acknowledged the
irony. "I started writing In the Heights," he said in a statement,
"because I didn't feel seen. And over the past 20 years all I wanted
was for us-ALL of us-to feel seen."

He continued, "I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino
representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so
much to represent with pride and joy ... I can hear the hurt and
frustration over colorism."

Like everything Miranda writes, this apology was pitch-perfect. But the
damage has been done. Unlike a play, you can't recast a movie.

So I got to thinking: How the hell could this have happened? This, after
all, is

**Lin-Manuel Miranda**.

In the Heights, as his first Broadway musical in 2008, preceded the epic

**Hamilton**, where Miranda famously cast America's founding fathers
as African Americans and told the story in hip-hop. There is nobody in
musical theater more alert to race.

Evidently, the several co-producers and casting directors, putting a lot
of money into a mass-market crossover film, wanted to be sure it would
attract a huge, i.e., white, audience. So it could not be too Black. I
have no inside sources for this supposition, and I suspect this was more
subconscious than deliberate. Lighter-complexioned Latin dancers and
actors just somehow rose to the top of the pool-in a meld of subtle
racism and commercialism,

This, in the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter; and this in a
theater piece written by Lin-Manuel Miranda! Another irony is that if
you want to look at the future of America as a multiracial society, walk
through the real Washington Heights, where there is every shade of
American.

If this can happen to a movie adaptation of a musical by Lin-Manuel
Miranda, of all people, it makes you realize once more just how deeply
racism is embedded in the American consciousness, even when
well-intentioned Hollywood liberals think they are celebrating
multiracialism.

A Happy Juneteenth to all. It's good, finally, to officially mark the
day. But we have such a long way to go.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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