[PEN-L:33539] Re: The ideological implications of Scorcese's latest film

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

At 10:20 AM -0600 12/31/02, Kendall Grant Clark wrote:
> But, no, it's mute about the degree to which such white riots were
> typically called forth (McKoy calls this 'ululation') by whites
> (perhaps especially by business leaders and other elities,
> particularly by white newspapers), as happened in the Wilmington NC
> (1898) riot (which McKoy analyzes at length) and in the Atlanta
> (1906) and Tulsa (1921) riots (which she does not analyze).

I've already said that _Gangs of New York_ is underdeveloped
concerning the relation between blacks and whites, but I don't think
that it is necessary to put the burden of representing how white
riots in general -- beyond the NY draft riots of 1863 -- typically
began upon one particular film.  Such a historical sense can be
developed only cumulatively, through efforts of many artists,
scholars, and activists.  There have been at least three other films
that portray white riots: _The Killing Floor_ (Dir. Bill Duke, 1985),
_Rosewood_ (Dir. John Singleton, 1997), and _The Tulsa Lynching of
1921: A Hidden Story_ (Dir. Michael Wilkerson, 2000) [the last one is
a documentary].  It is better to criticize _Gangs..._ for its
representation of the NY draft riots (e.g., its omission of white
politicians, newspapers, churches, etc. spreading the demagoguery
that emancipated slaves would take the jobs of white workers, the
burning of a black church and a black orphanage, etc.), its inability
to explain the friendship of Amsterdam and Jimmy, etc.

At 10:20 AM -0600 12/31/02, Kendall Grant Clark wrote:
> To say nothing of the post-riot representations of violence in white
> culture, history, and memory, in which black bodies and
> black-initiated and sustained violence are created and then made to
> displace the actions of whites as the cause of the communal violence.

This is a contested terrain in American culture, and if today's
Americans do not remember the race riots from the past at all, much
less their causes and effects, the fault is more ours than the past
generations', for post-riot representations of violence did include
many efforts on the part of blacks, whites, and others who tried to
represent them accurately.  For instance, here's a wood engraving
that appeared in _Harper's Weekly_ (dated August 1, 1863):
<http://www.nyhistory.org/teachers/37pic.html>.  Here's another from
_Harper's Weekly_:
<http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/vny/draftriots/Day2/sources/328.html>.
The latter especially makes unmistakable who the aggressor is and
where the artist's (and _Harper's_) sympathy lies.  According to the
latter website, "by 1863 _Harper's Weekly_ had the widest circulation
of the nation's three weekly illustrated newspapers."  Here's a
written account, for example:

*****   Excerpt from Joel Tyler Headley, _Pen and Pencil Sketches of
the Great Riots_ (1877)

...All this time the fight was going on in every direction, while the
fire-bells continually ringing increased the terror that every hour
became more wide-spread. Especially was this true of the negro
population. From the outset, they had felt they were to be objects of
vengeance, and all day Monday and to-day those who could leave, fled
into the country. They crowed the ferry-boats in every direction,
fleeing for life. But old men and women, and poor families, were
compelled to stay behind, and meet the fury of the mob, and to-day it
became a regular hunt for them. A sight of one in the streets would
call forth a halloo, as when a fox breaks cover, and away would dash
a half a dozen men in pursuit. Sometimes a whole crowd streamed after
with shouts and curses, that struck deadly terror to the heart of the
fugitive. If overtaken, he was pounded to death at once; if he
escaped into a negro house for safety, it was set on fire, and the
inmates made to share a common fate. Deeds were done and sights
witnessed that one would not have dreamed of, except among savage
tribes.

At one time there lay at the corner of Twenty-seventh Street and
Seventh Avenue the dead body of a negro, stripped nearly naked, and
around it a collection of Irishmen, absolutely dancing or shouting
like wild Indians. Sullivan and Roosevelt Streets are great negro
quarters, and here a negro was afraid to be seen in the street. If in
want of something from a grocery, he would carefully open the door,
and look up and down to see if any one was watching, and the steal
cautiously forth, and hurry home on his errand. Two boarding-houses
here were surrounded by a mob, but the lodgers, seeing the coming
storm, fled. The desperadoes, finding only the owner left behind,
wreaked their vengeance on him, and after beating him unmercifully,
broke up the furniture, and then fired the buildings. A German store
near by, because it was patronized extensively by negroes, shared the
same fate, after its contents had been distributed among themselves.
A negro barber's shop was next attacked, and the torch applied to it.
A negro lodging-house in the same street next received the visit of
these furies, and was soon a mass of ruins. Old men, seventy years of
age, and young children, too young to comprehend what it all meant
were cruelly beaten and killed. The spirit of hell seemed to have
entered the hearts of these men, and helpless womanhood was no
protection against their rage. Sometimes a stalwart negro would break
away from his murderers, and run for his life. With no place of
safety to which he could flee, he would be headed off in every
direction, and forced towards the river. Driven at last to the end of
a pier, he would leap off, preferring to take his chances in the
water rather than among these bloody men. If bruised and beaten in
his desperate struggle for life, he would soon sink exhausted with
his efforts. Sometimes he would strike out for a ship, but more often
dive under the piers, and hold on to a timber for safety, until his
yelling pursuers had disappeared, when he would crawl stealthily out,
and with terrified face peer in every direction to see if they had
gone. Two were thus run off together into the East River. It was a
strange spectacle to see a hundred Irishmen pour along the streets
after a poor negro. If he could reach a police station he felt safe;
but, alas! if the force happened to be away on duty, he could not
stay even there. Whenever the police could strike the track of the
mad hunt, they stopped it summarily, and the pursuers became the
pursued, and received the punishment they had designed for the negro.
All this was in the nineteenth century, and in the metropolis of the
freest and most enlightened nation on earth....

<http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/vny/draftriots/Day2/sources/300.html>   *****

There is no attempt in the above to misrepresent the riot and pass
off Irish violence against blacks as if it were in retaliation for
black violence against them.  If anything, the ideological agenda of
many representations of the NY draft riots was _not_ to make blacks
look like aggressors _but_ to make the oppression of the Irish by
nativists invisible, make the Irish appear more racist and savage
than nativist whites and liberal elites (the standard of savagery in
ideology being American Indians), and represent the police and the
federal authorities as protectors to whom blacks should look.

At 10:20 AM -0600 12/31/02, Kendall Grant Clark wrote:
> race riots in the US were almost always white initiated and benefited whites

I disagree that race riots _benefited_ all whites.  Race riots were
tragedy not just for blacks but also working-class whites who
couldn't overcome racism and therefore failed to improve their
conditions.  That's why the conservative white elites -- many
politicians, newspapers, churches, etc. -- propagated among white
workers the fear of job competition from emancipated blacks to begin
with.

At 10:20 AM -0600 12/31/02, Kendall Grant Clark wrote:
> By focusing almost exclusively on violence between Irish immigrants
> and nativists, Gangs mystifies (well, ignores altogether, really)
> the social and historical process by which the Irish became as white
> as any 'nativist', in ways that African Americans and other people
> of color never have.

If you don't want to have the Irish and other "ethnic whites" remain
nativist, though, it's best to represent them at the stage when they
were not yet quite "white," reminding the audience of suppressed
possibilities of the "path not taken," the path not taken being
principled solidarity between blacks and "not-quite-whites" (all
white workers but especially white immigrants and "ethnic whites").
The antagonism between the Irish and nativists should be the center
of the film for that purpose; and then, we can criticize the film for
what it doesn't quite manage to portray -- the complex relation
between blacks and the Irish, cooperation as well as competition,
especially at the stage when the Irish in America were not yet quite
"white," much less nativist, and the Irish in Ireland were suffering
from the worst colonial oppression in their history.  Cf. George
Bornstein, "Afro-Celtic Connections: From Frederick Douglass to The
Commitments, _Michigan Today_ (March 1996),
<http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/MT/96/Mar96/mta15m96.html>; and
Patricia J. Ferreira, "Frederick Douglass in Ireland: the Dublin
Edition of His Narrative," _New Hibernia Review_ 5.1 (2001) 53-67,
<http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/nhr/5.1ferreira.html>.

> And the creepy, sentimentalist U2 song at the very end obscures the
> degree to which the 'hands' which 'built America' were the hands of
> Chinese press gang laborers and African American slaves, both of
> which are represented in Scorcese's film:  never (or rarely) as
> active agents of history, but only as passive slates upon which
> Irish or nativist gangs (or politicians) foist and enact their
> desires (for exploitation, sexual amusement, entertainment, and so
> on).

For the film to represent blacks and Chinese as the center of their
own history, the point of view character has to be other than
Amsterdam.  The film doesn't simply represent the Chinese as screens
on which nativists and the Irish enact their desires.  As Amsterdam
plots his revenge, he enlists cooperation of the Chinese gang, and
his voice-over narration mentions that the Chinese had their own
reasons to hate the nativist gang.  If the audience can't imagine
what they are, that's the audience's fault, not the director's.  To
repeat, however, the film could have done a much better job of
exploring what blacks thought about the nativists and the Irish.

More generally, the very fact that Scorsese felt it necessary to have
just one point-of-view character in an epic results from a limitation
of the conventions of Hollywood Cinema in general, which tend not to
make full use of what cinema as a particular medium can do, having it
approximate the novelistic conventions instead (in this case,
bildungsroman).  In fact, it is not at all necessary for cinema to
have a clear point-of-view character.  It can easily do what such
modernist novelists as John Dos Passos only dreamt of doing, and then
more, especially representing collective subjects -- crowds in motion
-- in a way that is impossible for any other media.  The last part of
_Gangs of New York_ gives us only a glimpse of cinema's awesome power.
--
Yoshie

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