bsc forever
Happy Sunday! Hope everyone had a good “holiday” weekend — whether you felt like celebrating America or not. I, for one, stayed home alone and made a rhubarb pie just because.
Along with it being America’s birthday or whatever, the long-awaited Hamilton movie came out on Disney Plus, as I’m sure you all already know. I love the show and saw it twice (though never w/ the OG cast), so I was just as excited as all of the Hamilton stans to finally get to watch Leslie Odom as Aaron Burr, sir, the INSANE talents that are Renee Elise Goldsberry & Philippa Soo playing the Schuyler sisters, and Daveed Diggs rapping faster than should be humanly possible.
Hamilton was very ~progressive~ when it came out — with BIPOC leads playing the nation’s most famous old white dudes, re-centering America’s founding as a story of immigrants, and a story that praises revolution & protest.
But at the same time, it’s impossible to watch Hamilton in “today’s America” (read: an America fellow white people like myself should have been way more aware of at the time) and not think twice about a musical glorifying slave owners and erasing the real BIPOC who helped found the country. Not to mention, the fact that Alexander Hamilton literally created Wall Street & modern capitalism.
Arguments about this have been all over the internet this weekend, and this Vox piece is a great place to start if you want to explore it more.
How can one story simultaneously broadcast a contemptible message of myopic reverence for America’s founding fathers to some, while others take from it an equally powerful repudiation of everything those founding fathers represent?
For me — I will probably continue to love Hamilton — but with the understanding that it’s a very centrist musical about the Founding Fathers.
what else i’ve been reading:
BuzzFeed News: WHO DIED FOR YOUR DINNER? by Albert Samaha, Katie J.M. Baker, Ryan Mac & Rosie Gray
This piece is a stunning indictment of the U.S. food industry as a whole — and a forced reality check & reminder that people have literally died of coronavirus preparing the food that we’ve bought for our quarantine cooking.
A BuzzFeed News investigation reveals the extent to which the virus — and the nation’s inadequate response to it — has infected, sickened, and even killed workers up and down the nation's food supply chains as they work to keep our refrigerators full.
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Worried about putting themselves and restaurant staffers at risk, many Americans have turned to home cooking as a safer, more ethical option. But what may seem safer for consumers can still be deadly for the low-paid, often immigrant workers who make up America’s sprawling food supply chains. Across the country, from fields to packhouses to slaughterhouses to grocery stores, companies failed to require masks, build protective barriers, or arrange testing until after outbreaks had spread through the workforce. Some workers in the chain still do not get sick pay, forcing them to choose between spreading the virus or missing out on paychecks — between feeding your family or protecting their own.
ABC News: For some Native Americans, Mount Rushmore is a symbol of broken treaties, white domination, by Lauren Lantry, Stephanie Ebbs, and Cheyenne Haslett
Most of us probably learned about Mt. Rushmore in school — but I don’t remember learning about how it was built on land stolen from the Great Sioux Nation. This piece — written ahead of Trump’s trip to Mt. Rushmore last week — has a good summary of the atrocities the United States committed when they stole that land from its rightful owners - and carved into that land the faces of men who were slave owners & contributed to the genocide of Native Americans.
“Nothing stands as a greater reminder to the Great Sioux Nation of a country that cannot keep a promise or treaty then the faces carved into our sacred land on what the United States called Mount Rushmore,” Chairman Harold Frazier of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe said in a statement. ”We are now being forced to witness the lashing of our land with pomp, arrogance and fire hoping our sacred lands will survive.”
what i’ve been watching:
Okay guys I’m literally obsessed with the new The Babysitters Club series on Netflix. I was a huge fan of the series as a kid — and have even read some of the books recently along with the SSR podcast (which is great to listen to if you love YA). The book brings back all of that nostalgia (w/ everyone’s fave babysitters — Kristy is reading The Art of War! Mallory Pike is a HORSE GIRL) but does a good job updating it for Gen Z, so much that I think you COULD watch it if somehow you never read the books growing up. I cried throughout the 10-episode season — and cried AGAIN while reading the recaps, that’s how emotionally invested I am.
Here’s a piece from Vulture telling you to watch the show if you are slightly skeptical about my extreme excitement.
It is a vision of The Baby-Sitters Club that smartly updates it for the world of 2020, without also sacrificing the innate warmth and optimism of the original books. The books I read as a kid were formulaic and they absolutely had flaws, but their unmistakable message was that these girls had power, real power and responsibility in their own small, suburban world. I’m so glad to see that theme return in the TV series, and to see it insist that big, universal ideas can be expressed in a lovely, comforting show about a group of girls who take babysitting jobs in their neighborhood.
what i’ve been listening to:
Tatiana Hazel: DUALITY
Have a good rest of your Sunday!! I’ll just be here sad that I watched all of BSC way too quickly.