Multiracial Communities

In the early days of their film making Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee both only seemed to focus on their own races in earlier films and never really portrayed other groups in their city. Since then their newer films like Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York portray the city of New York as a multiracial town that doesn’t just have black and white roots.

Do the Right Thing is Lee’s greatest representation of a multiracial New York with the exception of 25th hour. In this 1989 movie that dealt with a racially diverse community we have several groups of people living together and sometimes doing it peacefully. It is set on a single street in Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood in Brooklyn which is starting to become more racially diverse rather then it being mainly populated by African-Americans. In this neighborhood we have several groups of people that include: Asians, Whites, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Blacks. The Black population is the majority population of the city. The film has three scenes that portray its ethnically growing community and each one represents how Spike Lee transcended from his early all black films to now.

Early on in the film we have Bugging out a character that easily becomes seen as the stories trouble maker have a confrontation with a white resident of the neighborhood. Bugging out is walking on his way to wherever he goes to enjoy himself when a white man with a Larry bird jersey scuffs his brand new shoes. Bugging out goes insane and confronts the man at what appears to be his home and they exchange several words. In this small scuffle of words between the two men Bugging out questions why the man is in his neighborhood, why did he buy a house in his town, and why doesn’t he go back to where he came from. This scene I believe slowly allows to see that the neighborhood is changing we have a white man moving into a majority all black neighborhood. Lee positions the black group with Bugging out all on one side and the lone white man on another representing how in this neighborhood he is representing the minority group. The second scene that also shows how the neighborhood is changing is the scene with the three homeless black men that comment on the neighborhood. The three men sit there all day and pick apart what is going on in their little community and at one point in the film the three make a comment about the Asian market. One of the older gentlemen says that the Asians are fresh off the boat yet they all ready have a shop open and are starting to invade every corner. This scene here just like the pervious one described earlier just discusses one race and that one race is now moving into this black neighborhood. The three gentlemen being to discuss why it isn’t a black mans shop. The comment of why isn’t it a black mans shop is proof enough that the area is starting to lose what identity it once had and that is an identity of an all black community. Finally The once scene in the movie that gives you an idea of how the community is changing is probably the most famous scene from the movie and that is the rant scene. The rant scene or as many call it the racial rant scene is a small one to two minute rant involving all the different ethnic groups in the community and having them bash one another. The scene starts with Mookie discussing Italians, then Pino discussing Blacks, a Puerto Rican discussing Asians, a White man discussing Puerto Ricans and finally an Asian discussing the White man. This scene even though has races trashing one another is a great representation of how the community has changed. In Lee’s early films it was an all black film no other race to be scene, but as the times moved on the community changed an now all these people live with one another. The way it is filmed is sort of a timeline fashion starting with the Blacks who where in the neighborhood first, then the Italians who are right next door, the Puerto Ricans who started to enter then the last two races the Whites and Asians who both seem to just entering into the neighborhood. The rant truly best represents how the area changed from an all Black to now a multicultural community that houses more people and new tensions to go along with those people.

Spike Lee’s first two films that we viewed in class were both shot in the same area and yet only represented the black population. As time moved on so did Spike Lee’s vision and he soon along with the neighborhood changed his ways of represtning it. As more and more races began to move into this community he represented it in his 1989 film Do the Right Thing by perfectly showing how the community reacted to this new transition of culture and races. Spike Lee did it representing at the time of the film the present, while Martin Scorsese does it by taking us to the past and showing us how the area of Five Points was racially diverse after the Civil War in his historic epic Gangs of New York. .

Gangs of New York is a film set in the mid-19th century in the Five Points district of New York City and deals with a territorial war between the gangs of the so called native groups of the area and the recently arrived, predominantly Irish Catholic immigrants, The Natives are a mainly American born English and Dutch men/women and are led by William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant with an open hatred of recent immigrants. The leader of the immigrant Irish, the "Dead Rabbits," is Priest Vallon, who has a young son, Amsterdam. Cutting and Vallon meet with their respective gangs in a battle, horrific and bloody, concluding when Bill kills Priest Vallon. Amsterdam is a witness. Cutting declares the Dead Rabbits outlawed and orders Vallon's body buried with honor. Amsterdam is placed in an orphanage and later returns to the city as an adult seeking revenge against the man that killed his father. Scorsese film is a great depiction of a multiracial city one that is already past the stage of people arriving and into the stage of trying to assimilate into society.

Since the film takes place after the Civil War we know historically America was rebuilding its self and had many different types of immigrants arriving each day in New York looking for work in the new rebuilding America. The Asian population was one of these new races moving to America in search of a new life. In the film by Scorsese the Asians are not represented as a group in which the natives are complete hostile to, instead they seem to provide something for the natives that the other groups do not and that is entertainment. Midway through the movie the two characters that the story rotates around decide to go visit a certain Asian establish meant that provides traditional Asian dance and music entertainment along with drinking, gambling, and women. This scene represents how the Asians decided to assimilate themselves into the native society and that was by becoming as I saw it their entertainment slaves only used long enough to fulfill the entertainment needs of the natives. I came to this conclusion because halfway through the Asian music the Butcher interrupts and takes matters into his hands and the whole thing just becomes a place for natives only and they being to kick people out. This I saw as a way to show that the Asians of the community were common enough to have their own area of town and their own venues such as the theater type building, but were still not considered natives and could be easily pushed aside whenever the natives got bored of them. The second group of people that are joining the slowly multiracial growing city is the Irish. The Irish in this movie seem to be the main targets of the natives. The natives despise the “Dead Rabbits” a group of Irish threatening the native population of the city. A scene that the Irish are starting to become a part of the city is when Amsterdam is discussing with his Irish brethren that there are thousands of Irish arriving each day. This is not a very visual scene but Scorsese uses this informational scene as a way to portray the cities changing demographic from a majority of natives to a majority of Irish. With thousands of Irish arriving each day the city becomes more diverse then it already is thus slowly achieving its goal of becoming the city it is today as Scorsese shows it being in the end with the glimpse of a modern day New York.

Spike Lee and his film Do the Right Thing represents how a small neighborhood deals with a racial changing demographic. The community goes from being predominantly black to being White, Black, Puerto Rican, Asian, and Italian. The film deals with how these groups lived together and how they all reacted toward ones action. Scorsese takes a historical look on how Five Points a past life of modern New York was racially diverse. He represented how natives treated the groups of people that had already been settled there for years like the Asians who were common enough to have their own area of Five Points and the Irish who were coming into the city in such large masses that they were changing the whole demographic of the area. Both directors started out only representing their race and culture in their films and only discussing their problems, but as the times moved on so did their vision of the neighborhoods they were representing in their films. Soon their films didn’t just focus on blacks or Italians now they focused on every other race and the relations they had with one another living in a small community. The works of these two men isn’t completely accurate and doesn’t exactly represent the way things were, but their work does help in giving us a basic sight onto these multiracial communities.



Bibliography

Dyer, R (1997).The Matter of Whitness.
Verdicchio, P (1997).Its a Jungle in Here.

IMDb. Retrieved July 23, 2008, from Do the Right Thing(1989) Web site: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097216/
IMDb. Retrieved July 23, 2008, from Gangs of New York(2002) Web site: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217505/