What would the Founding Fathers say about what is currently going on in the US? How does the state of US affairs today live up to Thomas Jefferson’s principles of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” set down in the Declaration of Independence? And, at the intersection of gender and race, what role do and did women and people of Color play in the establishment of these very ideals?

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical Hamilton, about the life of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, blew out all the stops at the box office when it premiered on Broadway in 2015. It also cast only people of Color in the leading roles of the historically White characters and, in this way, gave those people a voice, who had originally been left out of the mythical story that is told of the US founding. Hamilton has since continued its fantastical success by being produced all over the world – for a while, even in German in Hamburg.

But 2015 is nearly a decade ago, and the world was a very different place then – the musical had premiered against the historical backdrop of the nation’s second-term first Black president and first Black First Lady, and for a moment, this had even provoked a short-lived and naïve hope of something akin to a post-racial society. Nine years later, in the wake of Trump’s divisive presidency, a global pandemic, and an attack on the Capitol that rocked the nation’s core values, he is the Republican presidential candidate once again, having denied for four years that he lost the election to Joe Biden in 2020. While this is not the first time a male presidential candidate is facing a woman at the polls in the general election, it is the first time that he is pitted against a woman of Color, sitting Vice-President Kamala Harris.

With a new awareness about structural racism and sexism in dominant society following the #MeToo and #BLM movements, these are the two people who are today shaping the ideals that the founders set down nearly 250 years ago and which Hamilton retells on Broadway. In this class, we will be exploring the founders’ grand narratives depicted in the musical using Robin DiAngelo’s concept “Nice Racism” and Carol Anderson’s scholarship on “White Rage” through an intersectional lens to help us gain a better understanding of conflicting systems of inequality that have shaped “the land of the free and the home of the brave” and have brought us to this unique moment in time.