• Director Rolin Jones casts Jacob Anderson as “Louis” in latest AMC Interview With A Vampire adaptation.
•  “Hamilton” and why Brown-facing white fictions & histories lacks Black cultural awareness and continues white supremacy. 
• Why getting resources to culturally competent content creators and curators of color (such as culturally literate indie publishers) is key to anti-racism in DEI.

Rolin Jones’s recent adaptation of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview With A Vampire casts Jacob Anderson in the role of “Louis” (Seen above). The series premiered last week on AMC.

I am honestly a little speechless that recasting Louis as a Black man would seriously be considered addressing “anti-Blackness” in vampire fiction…This would have been recognized as problematic even ten years ago, and for good reason.

Recasting (racist) white fictions and white history with Black people is never the solution to anti-Blackness in fiction.  

Rather, this is what happens when we lack cultural literacy, and this is what happens when DEI focuses on white-led organizations and Euro-literary imagination instead of getting resources to anti-racist and otherwise culturally competent creatives and curators of color.

I thought that we knew this and also remembered why and how, but it appears that we remain in the condition of Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, seduced by the siren hymn of the missionaries who have moved into Mbanta’s “Evil Forest” in the novel Things Fall Apart:

The words of the hymm were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled.”

You might remember that Nwoye went on to become a teacher and would later convert his family.

Problem 1: We lack Cultural Literacy

Hamilton got us f* up. 

It has traditionally been a criticism of Black Art, by its own artists even, that it is “not enough” for ones soul. To be made whole as an artist, one had to move from Black Art to the “high art” of Europe. Not Black people singing Negro spirituals or ring shouts at the Met, but Black people playing prominent roles in Greek tragedy. Serious art required Black bodies to move through white stories and histories in order to be made complete.

See Also: Manichean Leitmotif 

Hamilton contemporized and popularized this maladaptive social behavior.

Instead of using “white art” to challenge its native anti-Blackness, it put an unforgivable white story in Black bodies and under the veil of singable popular Black culture. The play very simply tapped into the unchecked “desire” of colored people to be put into white fictions and histories in order to wholly see themselves. In other words: It took off like hot combs through a slave quarters. 

Problem 2: DEI empowers White-led institutions instead of “others”

Black and Brown people together consume an average 63 percent of book publishing content* — We are overrepresented in content consumption and underrepresented in ownership and content creation. 

This means that we are hungry for content created FOR us but consume the majority of racist content created AGAINST us.

We do not need white fiction and white histories recast with Black people. We need talented content creators of color versed in anti-racism and inclusion to be given resources to create safe and inclusive spaces, and vision, for the Black and Brown consumer majority. 

No more leadership by desperate and parched souls with “callow” imaginations. We need new and better stories. 

*According to a recent PubWest consumer report.
**I am aware that Alexander Hamilton is understood to have had African ancestry. Still, he was not Black in the play. However, there are “facts” about race, and there is race as a social construct. To be as much one race as the other (at least) and then to choose the race with which one will identify, or having that decided for you, is an aspect of race as a social construct. Hamilton identified as white, passed for white. He chose whiteness because he was white.
***And finally, just to be clear, “White mermaids” are the deviation, not Black Ariel.