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.
