In Harriet, Kasi Lemmons biopic about Harriet Tubman, theres a scene where our heroine, portrayed by Cynthia Erivo, steps on to free land as a free woman for the first time. After a grueling and life-threatening journey, she walks out into a green field of rolling hills, the sun shining brilliantly. The scene is a visual interpretation of Tubmans own real-life recollection of the event: There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.

When I spoke to Lemmons and Erivo at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, they said that the onscreen moment felt like a blessing from the spirit of Harriet Tubman herself. On the day of shooting, it had been raining all day, the sky was blacker than black, and there was concern that they would not be able to get the crucial shot of the sun over the hills. But Lemmons insisted they hold out, trudging up a waterlogged hill to set up the scene even as it continued to drizzle.

And the second Cynthia [arrived], the sky parted and that sun shone through, said Lemmons, the director of Eves Bayou and Talk to Me. It was crazy. Everyone burst into tears. We did that shot one time.

What you didnt see on the camera, Erivo added, was then you had a double rainbow behind us.

Though it felt like they had Tubmans blessing that day, the general attitude around the film, and specifically Erivos role in it, has been less idyllic. Reviews of the film that have come out since its premiere at TIFF have been mixed and Erivo had faced criticism even before she stepped on set.

The criticism surrounding Erivos casting and her seemingly elitist view toward African Americans has added fuel to a long-running debate across social media within the diaspora regarding the way first-generation Africans talk about African Americans, and vice versa. For some people, the problem with Erivos casting was not just that she wasnt a descendant of African slaves but that her past actions seem to suggest a lack of respect for those who are. What right, then, some wondered, did she have to play the most important conductor on the Underground Railroad?

When it was announced late last year that Erivo, the Nigerian-British actor best known for her Tony-winning performance on Broadway in The Color Purple, was set to star in the first major biopic about freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, there were some murmurings of disapproval from that nebulous entity commonly referred to as Black Twitter. Erivo was yet another performer in a long line of non-African American actors who had been hired to tell what some believed to be a specifically Black American story. The criticism had come up before in regard to Nigerian-British actor Chiwetel Ejiofors role in 12 Years a Slave and Nigerian-British actor David Oyelowo playing Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.

Erivo has also seemingly had a long and well-documented online history of expressing and co-signing sentiments that were disrespectful to African-American heritage and culture. As Twitter user @eBoPeep extensively laid out in 2018 not long after Erivos casting was announced, the British-born actor had made numerous transgressions. These included joking about putting on a ghetto American accent, conflating the experiences of Black British and Black Americans, and publicly defending Nigerian writer Luvvie Ajayi, who has been called out numerous times for her anti-ethnic sentiments about African Americans.

In a September 2018 Instagram post , Erivo made an attempt to address at least part of the concerns and controversy surrounding her casting.