Gangs of New York

    Gangs of New York is by far one of my favorite movies of all time. If you haven’t seen the movie I highly suggest you do, it is worth every bit of the 167 minutes. 

Gangs of New York was directed by Martin Scorsese who turned the 1928 non-fiction book “The Gangs of New York” by Herbert Asbury into a Hollywood motion picture. The film begins in the year 1846 in the period of the Great Famine of Ireland which lead to mass starvation and disease and immigration from Ireland to New York. Irish immigrants arrive in New York to settle in the neighborhood of Five Points, a slum area where the Irish would rule and over-crowed for the next two decades. A number of United States born citizens of British and Dutch decent started voicing their resentment of the new Irish immigrants. The antagonist William Cutting who is played by the incredibly talented Daniel Day Lewis, troops together his fellow native American’s into a gang to wipe out the Irish immigrants. After the killing the leader of the Irish immigrant gang “The Dead Rabbits”, Amsterdam Vallon, the son of the deceased leader played by Leonardo DiCaprio ultimately seeks revenge against his father’s murderer, Native’s leader William Cutting. The protagonist Amsterdam Vallon ultimately rallies together his late fathers gang to once again fight the Natives. 

Gangs of New York is filled with anti-Irish sentiment through the hate violence displayed against the Irish in the film, as well as the discourse used to depict Irish as lazy, dirty, disease ridden, drunks etc. What we know about discourse according to Michel Foucault from our Race, Racism and Colonialism class is that discourses create new knowledge and ways of thinking about a certain group or idea. Discourse also effects how we approach conversation about a certain topic and how our ideas are put into practice. 

This clip is from the beginning of the movie when the Irish immigrants arrived at the docks in New York after their journey from Ireland. The discourse around anti-Irish sentiment in this video is displayed by the Natives of New York and the newspaper clipping at the beginning referring to the Irish arriving as “an Irish invasion” as well as referring to them as “locusts”. To speak of the Irish immigrants as “locusts” dehumanizes them which strips them from having any moral consideration . We see this when a Native man throws a a rock at a little girl who has just arrived with her parents while heckling the Irish "Go back to Ireland you dumb mick" and another "Get back in the boat Paddy!". The term "Mick" and "Paddy" are both derogatory names for the Irish and are both considered ethnic slurs, which are offensive terms for people of Irish decent, these terms have the same negative connotations as the word "nigger".

References

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge 

Racial Slurr Database. "Irish"