Читать книгу America on Film - Sean Griffin - Страница 34

It may seem odd to begin an exploration of the representations of racial and ethnic minorities with a chapter on the images of white people in American cinema. However, to fully understand how certain people and communities are considered to be racial minorities, it is also necessary to examine how the empowered majority group conceives of and represents itself. Doing so places white communities under a microscope, and reveals that the concept of whiteness (the characteristics that identify an individual or a group as belong to the Caucasian race) is not as stable as is commonly supposed. Under white patriarchal capitalism, ideas about race and ethnicity are constructed and circulated in ways that tend to keep white privilege and power in place. Yet surveying representations of whiteness in American film raises fundamental questions about the very nature of race and/or ethnicity. Although it may surprise generations of the twenty‐first century, some people who are now commonly considered to be white were not considered so in the past. The most common designation of whiteness in the United States is the term WASP, which stands for White Anglo‐Saxon Protestant. People of non‐Anglo‐Saxon European ancestry have historically had to negotiate their relation to whiteness. If American culture had different ideas about who was considered white at different times over the past centuries, then claims about race and ethnicity as absolute markers of identity become highly problematic.

This chapter explores the differing socio‐historical and cinematic constructions of whiteness throughout the history of American film. It examines the representations of several (but not all) of the communities that were not originally welcomed into American society as white, but which have been more recently assumed to belong to this racial category. The following discussion examines how these groups were represented with certain stereotypes, how these communities developed strategies for acceptance by white society, and how cinema functioned as part of this cultural negotiation. But first, the chapter begins with a discussion of how film works within dominant hegemonic culture to subtly – and almost invisibly – speak about the centrality of whiteness.