Racial And Cultural Differences In West Side Story

The Film "West Side Story" illustrates how the Puerto Ricans of New York faced discrimination and were used as scapegoats by the American people during the cold war time period to escape their anxieties. Due to the fear of communism and possible nuclear war the 1950-1960s time period was a very fragile time for the American people which produced an air of xenophobia throughout the country. The air of xenophobia is present throughout the play due of the repeated mention of stereotypes about Puerto Ricans and the constant feeling that the Puerto Ricans do not belong. The people of American often dealt with these anxieties in one of two ways, through escapism or through and through the scapegoating. This is made very clear through the comparison of West Side Story to the play The Music Man in the document “West Side Story and The Music Man: Whiteness, Immigration, and Race in the US during the late 1950s”. Like many waves of immigrants, the Puerto Ricans faced discrimination when they arrived and for some time after. This came in the form of people being discriminatory directly to them, housing discrimination and job discrimination. Therefore, the play “West Side Story” expresses the discrimination that Puerto Ricans faced due to the xenophobic nature of the time period.

How does racism affect a story? As a kid in the 1930s, Harper Lee grew up when there was hardly any equality for African Americans. Harper Lee’s only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is heavily based off of prejudice and racism from her childhood. In her book, she writes about racial discrimination through the eyes of a six year-old girl, named Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch, during the Great Depression. Her and her family are deeply tied into racism and prejudice involved throughout this story. Racism in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is ever apparent as the story is located in a small southern town in Alabama; it is reflected upon three of the main characters: Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch, Jem Finch and their father, Atticus Finch.

Many tragic events happen in this short story that allows the reader to create an assumption for an underlying theme of racism. John Baldwin has a way of telling the story of Sonny’s drug problem as a tragic reality of the African American experience. The reader has to depict textual evidence to prove how the lifestyle and Harlem has affected almost everything. The narrator describes Harlem as “... some place I didn’t want to go. I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt. It filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality” (Baldwin 60). Another key part in this story is when the narrator and Sonny’s mother is telling the story of a deceased uncle. The mother explains how dad’s brother was drunk crossing the road and got hit by a car full of drunk white men. Baldwin specifically puts emphasis on the word “white” to describe the men for a comparison to the culture of dad and his brother.

In Cornel West’s “Race Matters”, he expresses his thoughts and ideas on a variety of different issues we have encountered in both past and present times. One such issue is the failure of the liberal structuralist program. West introduces the Nihilistic threat to the readers, where life is meaningless and purposeless to the universe, and then explains how liberal structuralists seemingly fail to deal with this threat. He begins by blaming the liberal structuralists for focusing too heavily on the economy and politics and not focusing enough on culture and its character. The liberal structuralists address the plight of Black America by calling for full employment, health, education, and childcare through more government money, better bureaucrats, and active citizens (PowerPoint). He then refers to their views on people as basically selfish and self-centered. This meaning that they are mainly concerned only with how they are viewed and self-benefit, and not with the value of others’ self-worth and desire for importance. West later talks about the structuralists’ inability to discuss culture because it opened up a topic on race which the structuralists were not comfortable talking about. During the time, race was talked about in few ways. Ideas on race had remained steady throughout time, and with the new realm of ideas, the structuralists seemed resistant to discussing race in depth and for its actual worth. It is because of this that West claims that liberal

“Éste es un mundo brillante, éstas son mis calles, mi barrio de noche, con sus miles de luces, cientos de millones de colores mezclados con los ruidos, un sonido vibrante de carros, maldiciones, murmullos de alegría y de llantos, formando un gran concierto musical (Thomas, Down These Mean Streets, 1998, p. 3)”, is how Piri Thomas describes his birthplace, East Harlem. The diversity of cultures, the vibrant street life, the passion and conflicts of everyday life and media portrayal in movies such as West Side Story make East Harlem an exciting and mysterious place. But hidden under the dirty faces of the children is the struggle in the search for acceptance and belong,

1. The theme of the story is: Racism is an issue that never seems to disappear no matter how much people say it does.

The film depicts the lives of those who live on a city block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York where Sal’s Famous Pizzeria is located. Racial and ethnic hatred is shown through the characters who frequent the Italian restaurant. Sal’s son, Pino, wants to move the Pizzeria into their own neighborhood away

The movie 'Ethnic Notions' describes different ways in which African-Americans were presented during the 19th and 20th centuries. It traces and presents the evolution of the rooted stereotypes which have created prejudice towards African-Americans. This documentary movie is narrated to take the spectator back to the antebellum roots of African-American stereotypical names such as boy, girl, auntie, uncle, Sprinkling Sambo, Mammy Yams, the Salt and Pepper Shakers, etc. It does so by presenting us with multiple dehumanized characters and cartons portraying African-Americans as carefree Sambos, faithful Mammies, savage Brutes, and wide-eyed Pickaninnies. These representations of African-Americans roll

From there on movies shifted from their portrayals of Latino males as "Latin lovers" to "urban banditos". Films changed from problems involving women, sex, and love to delinquency, drugs, and gang fights. Movies such as West Side Story, Scarface, and Fort Apache, the Bronx, all use Latinos as "scapegoats" to focus the problems of society to the immigration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S.

In these lines from Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa,” the speaker emphasizes the natural human tendencies to “inflict pain.” Similarly, in his poem, “Sympathy,” Paul Dunbar explores pain from the point of view of a bird being trapped in a cage. It flaps its wings and tries to escape but it cannot. The bird symbolizes an African American bound by slavery and unable to escape. On the other hand, in Claude McKay’s poem “The Harlem Dancer,” the dancer feels as if

“Need a haircut, greaser?’” “’How’d you like that haircut to begin just below the chin?”(Hinton, pg.5) A Soc says, as Ponyboy gets jumped by a few Socs. There is a colossal rivalry between the Socs and the greasers, and it has always been that way. The two gangs cannot see each other and put aside their differences, thus the greasers, the poorer gang, on occasion, experience “jumps”, or in other words gets injured by a couple of Socs. This goes the same for West Side Story, a movie created in 1961. In West Side Story, two gangs, the Sharks (Puerto Ricans), and the Jets (White), are rivals, and one gang is thought of a lesser group of people. Slowly but surely, both gangs in both The Outsiders and West Side Story and eventually put aside their differences. In both West Side Story, and The Outsiders, the gangs learn a very important theme: “I should do what is right, even if it means crashing the stereotypes.”

In the reading West side story by Alberto Sandoval he explains how the film perpetuates the image of racial problems explaining that the film has its profound structure expressing segregation and racial preferences towards Latinos. The film makers presented the immigrants as stereotypical Puerto Ricans making their skin tones darker, black haired, skinny. The jets are blond, strong, and healthy. The clarity

For centuries, racism has become the universal epitome of culture, despite the efforts of various civilizations, such as the Western and European to combat these indifferences among people. A race is specific social group that can be differentiated through various ways, from facial features and hair textures, to social norms and habits that constitutes to that group. These differences contribute to our uniqueness and humanity. Because people can be grouped by any number of differences, Man, lead by his ignorance, perpetuated the issue once social-hierarchies began to develop, splitting society to its various groups. As a result, social disparity from one’s upbringing became the common tendency to look down, or look up at people of other

In Cornel West’s essay, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference”, West describes this new cultural politics of difference to have three challenges: intellectual, existential, and political. The new cultural politics of difference trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity and reject the abstract and the universal in light of the concrete. Cornel West, through the use of the three major historical periods (Age of Europe, America’s Domination, Civil Rights Movement), explains the importance of intervention in order to change and improve upon the mistakes of the past and reject the false degrading stereotypes that were created during those times. Throughout his essay, Cornel West uses examples of the battle between the people of color and White Progressives effectively because it allows the readers to understand that for changes to be made one must be simultaneously be in the group challenging the system and in the system itself in order for social reforms to occur within the society they live in.

Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman would be considered a historical allegory that could be understood as this poetic and dramatic expression of the relationship between whites and blacks throughout the existence of the United States. These patterns of history are symbolically acted out by the two characters Lula and Clay; Lula represents white America and Clay seems to stand for the modern day Uncle Tom, who has over time been shaped by white America and this slave mentality.