Racism in early American film

Themes of white supremacy and xenophobia are commonly found within these films, reflecting contemporary attitudes towards non-white groups, taking on different imagery as race relations shift.

[3] The film depicted Ku Klux Klansmen as the saviors of the nation that brought back a stable government and upheld American values.

[4] After the movie's debut, racial violence against African Americans increased, including the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in November of the same year.

Scholar Corin Willis said about the use of blackface in The Jazz Singer:In contrast to the racial jokes and innuendo brought out in its subsequent persistence in early sound film, blackface imagery in The Jazz Singer is at the core of the film's central theme, an expressive and artistic exploration of the notion of duplicity and ethnic hybridity within American identity.

Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American movie star, commonly featured in Hollywood films as supporting characters or "Dragon Lady" villainesses during the early 1920s.

Anti-miscegenation laws prevented onscreen interracial relationships, forcing Wong to remain in stereotypical "vamp" roles until Daughter of the Dragon in 1931.

[8] [9] The trope of the "lotus blossom" was also often pushed in early Hollywood to depict East Asian women as docile, innocent, and submissive.

[12] Media like Madame Butterfly has played a significant role in shaping and perpetuating stereotypes that continue harm Asian women immensely.

During the silent film era, Native American characters did not talk much; when synchronized sound made its way into the theaters in the thirties, the distortion took a different magnitude.

Although the demographic growth that started in the 1930s proved otherwise, the Western culture and Indian stereotypes steeped deep in the American consciousness to the point of obliteration of Native identity.

[13] Another striking example of the mechanism explored above would be King Vidor's Northwest Passage (1940), a work used in the wake of the United States' involvement in World War II by the National Education Association to teach children the necessity of engaging in a fight for freedom.

Taking place in 1759 in the time of the French and Indian War, the film is a vivid testimony to the historical moment during which it was produced.

In Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson shows that "nation-ness" is but a cultural artefact that commands "profound emotional legitimacy" and establishes boundaries, new frontiers, "beyond which lie other nations".

The film centers on Audrey Hepburn's character Holly Golightly as she navigates moving to the glamorous New York City.