Gangs of New York and Goldberg's Underclass

In this clip from Gangs of New York, American “Natives” leader William Cutting approaches the Irish neighborhood the Five Points with his gang behind him. Cutting immediately plants his feet firmly into the snowy ground almost as if to already claim the land he intends on winning through battle with the Irish gang “The Dead Rabbits”. The camera then focuses in on Cuttings fake eye which has a bald eagle where his pupil should be. The image of the bald eagle, which is the National bird of the United States and is the in the central aperture of his eye, symbolizes the importance of America to him, what he stands for and what he is willing to fight for. The camera then gives us a birds eye view of the two gangs who are face on, standing erect with axes, knives and other weaponry, ready to battle. William Cutting speaks up and says to the leader of Irish gang, Priest Vallon, “Is this it, Priest? The Pope's new army? A few crusty bitches and a handful of rag tags?”, he goes on to challenge The Dead Rabbits, “At my challenge, by the ancient laws of combat, we are met at this chosen ground, to settle for good and all who holds sway over the Five Points: us Natives, born RIGHT-WISE to this fine land, or the foreign hordes defiling it!”. The language used in this quote is used to disparage the Irish immigrants in this scene. The term “rag tag” is referred to people who are of low worth, dirty, filthy, ragged and unkempt which was the discourse around the Irish immigrants in the film. Over this semester, I learned about David Goldberg and his idea of racial knowledge. Goldberg states,

What follows is a critical reading of three conceptual schemata hegemonic in the production of contemporary racialized knowledge that now define and order popular conceptions of people racially conceived: the Primitive, the Third World, and the Underclass. These terms and the conceptual schemes they mark as the most prominent and general in silently ordering formal and popular knowledge of the Other in and through the study of cultural, political, and economic relations..(Goldberg. 1993).

To refer to the Irish as “rag tags”, suggesting they are not born “right wise” and referring to them as “foreign hordes” “defiling” the Natives homeland, puts them into Goldberg’s “Underclass”. The "Underclass" according to Goldberg,

The Underclass population came to be characterized in behavioral terms, a set of pathological social attitudes, actions and activities. The outward visible sign of these pathologies was race. Thus, the notion was relinked to the nineteenth-century conceptions of the “undeserving poor”, the “rabble”, and the “lumpenproletariat” (Goldberg, 1993). 

The term “lumpenproletariat” from the German word “lumpen” which originally meant “rags” and was later used to mean “a person in rags”, was coined by Marx and defined in Marxist theory to describe those members of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked class consciousness (Encyclopedia of Marxism). This term used by Goldberg to describe the Underclass corresponds with the term "rag tags" used by William Cutting in Gangs of New York to describe the Irish immigrants. To the Natives, the Irish encompassed  Goldberg's meaning of the underclass as they were the poor immigrating from Ireland and who were undeserving of the American land, the "rabble" or the lowest class of people, and finally the "lumpenproletariats", the ragged unemployed.



References

Encyclopedia of Marxism. "Lumpenproletariat". http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/u.htm

Goldberg, D. T. (1993). Racist culture: Philosophy and the politics of meaning. (pp. 1-328).