Don’t get me wrong I am in no way racist. I just feel that if broadway is going to put on a show about 1800’s France then they should cast the characters to be accurate to that time period. I’m just really bothered by the fact that on broadway right now Enjolras, the character fighting for a republic in France, is black.
Les Miserables is about the poverty in France. Enjolras was a wealthy well educated young man. In 1800’s France black people were slaves. Les Miserables takes place in 1832 and slavery wasn’t abolished until 1848. There was no way that a black person in France during the time les Mis takes place would have been wealthy and well off. They would have either been slaves or extremely poor and treated horribly. Yes while the current Enjolras has a great voice, the show isn’t just about the music. Broadway should not have cast him because it’s not historically accurate. So please don’t think I’m being racist because I am not. I just think broadway should keep cast accurate to the play and think about not only the history but the setting of the play.1. The accepted policy for shows that don’t directly address race is color-blind casting, aka “shut the fuck up and suspend your disbelief already,” for a number of excellent reasons including “do we REALLY need white people coming up with reasons to blanket exclude non-white people from getting jobs on the basis that it’s ‘not realistic,’ because of course white people are the ones who tend to be objective and unbiased and never ever make dumbfuck assumptions because they always pay enough attention to people of color to know their history in every single time and place.”
2. Case in point: even if the policy weren’t color-blind casting, the assumption that there were no black people in 19th-century France is factually incorrect, and the assumption that if there were any they would be absolutely confined to poverty and low-status social roles is based on the way racism works in the United States, which still bears the cultural legacy of having been a slave society. France was the mothership for a bunch of colonies that were slave societies, but within the country itself, anyone who set foot on French soil automatically became free. So while there was a good deal of colorism and exoticizing/Othering and people being racist dicks, racism in mainland France did not generally involve attempts to limit black people to slave or servant roles; even the association between the two wasn’t that strong, because a lot of the people of color in France were there to get a good education (notably, mixed-race children and children of free blacks from the colonies, and separately, a number of wealthy young men from Middle Eastern and North African countries undergoing pushes towards modernization). American visitors to France in the early 19th century even exclaimed over the fact that law-school lectures included a handful of young black men who were fashionably dressed and mingled freely with the other students without it being particularly remarked upon. And this post is already too long to go into the ties between 1820s/30s revolutionaries, the original French Revolution, and the fight against slavery, but basically, it would be 100% believable for a society like the Amis to be all over a black member of the group, and if you need examples, Alexandre Dumas in addition to writing great adventure novels was also pretty enthusiastic about building barricades and trying to overthrow the government whenever the chance presented itself, and AFAIK never got racist shit for it from his fellow revolutionaries (he sometimes did from bystanders).
So basically, even if you throw aside the issue of color-blind casting, of all the roles in Les Mis ‘student revolutionary’ is one of the MOST likely for a young black man to be in at that time and place.
Any post that begins “I am in no way racist” is probably going to be racist, let’s face it