Chapter 3: The Concept of Whiteness and American Film
Looking for Respect: Italians in American Cinema
Bleaching the Green: The Irish American Cinema
A Special Case: Jews and Hollywood
Veiled and Reviled: Arabs on Film in America:
Seeing White
-Whiteness is the main theme of almost every American films.
Immigrants came to American from a wide variety of countries and thus claim a wide range of national heritages.
Italian people emigrated to America and became a part of a great surge in immigration that occurred in America during the final years of the nineteenth century.
- Irish had sufficiently time in American cinema (Hollywood)
The Arabs actor join the Hollywood as the bad man in the film. In Amerian movie the hero fight with the bad gay who is Arabs. And the Arabs girls always with the veil
Targeted by hate crimes and hate speech;
Featured grotesque stereotypes : hunchbacked, hook-nosed, and greedy cheats;
money grubbing and untrustworthy.
They use blackface to make them look more like white people;
negotiate their images within a large white group people.
at first they were portrayed in stereotypical representations such as working class man and simple minded;
In 1920, they were portrayed as handsome, exotic and leading man, for example,Rudolph Valentino. And then from gangster film to war movies.
Finally Italian Americans have become the most part regarded as white.
During 1960 and 1970, whiteness was being taken off.
- Americans called them "white niggers"
They were the first one who came to "New World"
- Early films typically showed Irish American as small, fiery-tempered, heavy-drinking, working-class men.
-Mostly in the American film industries, characters are represented in white heterosexual aspects.
And the Arabs girls always with the veil.
And they succeed when the war about the oil happened.. American always have the war with the Arabs country.That make them more succeed as a bad character in a film.