From America on Film:
The great potato famine of the 1840s drove hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens mainly of poor Catholic background across the Atlantic ocean to the United States. Facing their first significant wave of immigration, many Americans reacted with fear and hostility. Conveniently forgetting their own recent resettlement from Europe, a number of American citizens rallied around the new cause of Nativism : that America should be for Americans and not for foreigners. Laws were passed in various states restricting immigration, denying voting rights, and prohibiting Irish
American citizens from holding elective office. Speeches, newspaper editorials, and political cartoons often described Irish Americans as barely human: they were represented as small, hairy, apelike creatures with a propensity for violence, drunkenness, and unchecked sexual impulses. Similar descriptions were used for African Americans during these years, and comparisons were often made between the two groups. Irish Americans were commonly called white niggers while African Americans were sometimes referred to as smoked Irish. Such shared discrimination at times tied the two communities together. Some people saw that the groups had a shared struggle and linked the institutional slavery of African Americans to the wage slavery of Irish immigrants, many of whom worked as servants in white households. Yet, more often than not, Irish American communities responded to such comparisons by distancing themselves from African Americans, in some cases through violent race riots. By strenuously denying similarities to African Americans, Irish Americans strove to be regarded as white and not black. Similarly, conceptions of Irish
whiteness were dramatized on stage via the conventions of blackface, a popular theatrical tradition of the 1800s that featured white performers darkening their faces with makeup in order to perform broad, comedic stereotypes of African Americans. Blackface was one way that popular culture distinguished between white and non-white behaviors and identities. By leading the blackface trend, Irish American performers did acknowledge on some level how many people conflated the two groups. These performers thus positioned themselves as white people who needed to black up to play the parts, defining themselves against a racial Other of blackness. In so doing, Irish American performers promoted their own whiteness, in effect saying you may consider us lesser, but at least we are not black. Representations of Irish Americans in early American cinema drew upon already-established stereotypes and misconceptions developed in other media such as literature, newspaper cartooning, and the theater. Alternatively referred to as Paddy, the Boy-o, or the Mick, early films typically showed Irish Americans as small, fiery-tempered, heavy-drinking, working-class men. Irish American women also appeared in many early films, typically as ill-bred, unintelligent house servants, often named BridgetYet these derogatory images of Irish Americans were short-lived, for by the advent of early cinema, public perceptions about Irish Americans were shifting. Irish Americans had been assimilating into American whiteness for half a century, and by the early 1900s, new waves of immigrants from other countries began to inundate the United States. Many of these immigrants originated from Southern and Eastern Europe, and many Americans regarded these new immigrants as darker or more swarthy (that is, less white) than immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. The Irish suddenly seemed more white in comparison.
The text then states: Gangs of New York (2002) is one of the few films that acknowledges what Irish Americans endured in the struggle for acceptance into whiteness during the 1800s.
In a 3-4 page essay, answer the following questions: Do you agree with the statement made by the text? Does the film depict the hardship endured by Irish Americans in their struggle for acceptance? Did you relate the film to the larger Irish American struggle? Or is the film interested in a good story and uses the history to create a violent and gritty story about gangs that really tells you very little about the Irish in New York?
Length: 3-4 pages
Be sure to use readings to cite and support your arguments. However, DO NOT USE LENGTHY QUOTES. You may cite the readings by using the author\’s last name and page number or a shortened website title. No works cited is necessary.
12 point font.
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Benshoff, Harry M.; Griffin, Sean (2011-08-26). America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies (p. 60). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
