Ever since Broadway’s Hamilton popped in ’15 movies and stage shows been force-feeding progressive instruction to audiences…a hammering education about how things should or could have been in the past, if whites hadn’t been such racist assholes.

In the HE realm I’ve been calling it woke presentism for…what, three or four years?

In a 3.31.24 N.Y Times Sunday Magazine piece, written by By Kabir Chibber, it’s called “the Magical Historical Past.”

Yes, the N.Y. Times has finally summoned the courage to take notice of this widespread, years-long phenomenon. It actually calls it “Hollywood’s New Fantasy.” Hot off the presses.

Chibber quote: “You might call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed.”

We all know the drill. Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots. Lynsey Miller and Eve Hedderwick Turner‘s Anne Boleyn. B’way’s Hamilton. Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Dev Patel as David Copperfield. Marvel’s Norse pantheon with a Black deity. A recently released version of Jane Austen‘s Sense and Sensibility is all Soul Sistahs. Bridgerton‘s Regency England ruled by a Black queen and a multiracial royal court. In BBC One’s Murder is Easy, originally written in 1939 and set (I think) in the 1950s, the lead protagonist and investigator is a Nigerian immigrant.