Racism in early American film

In February 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith was released.[3] The film depicted Ku Klux Klansmen as the saviors to the nation that bring back a stable government and uphold American values. The movie used actors in blackface to depict African Americans as mindless, lustful savages, portraying them as an active danger to White Americans to justify violence against them.[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.[5]

In 1927, the film The Jazz Singer by Alan Crosland was released,[6] regarded as being the first sound film. One of the central themes was the use of blackface by Jewish character Jack Robins. The use of blackface in the film has led to controversy, particularly in regards to its role in the plot and its Jewish character.

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. Of the more than seventy examples of blackface in early sound film 1927–53 that I have viewed (including the nine blackface appearances Jolson subsequently made), The Jazz Singer is unique in that it is the only film where blackface is central to the narrative development and thematic expression.[7]

Many racist tropes of East Asian peoples were codified in early Hollywood films.

Charlie Chan (based on the real Chang Apana), was depicted as a "good Asian", used as an antithesis to Fu Manchu, the "bad Asian" villain. In 1929, the American film The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, starring Warner Oland as the villain Fu-Manchu, was released. The villain Fu-Manchu incorporated contemporary Yellow Peril motifs, an antagonist to white characters and demonstrating otherworldly powers to control the white female lead.

The Show of Shows was released the same year and featured a stereotypical setting with Nick Lucas and Myrna Loy.

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]

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. The characters spoke an alien-sounding language that often was not a genuine Native language, therefore excluding Natives from the audience and increasing their misrepresentation. Their English dialogue was sometimes shot spoken backwards and later printed in reverse so that a new artificial “Indian” language was heard.[9]

Throughout the early 1900s, many films that perpetuate stereotypes about Native Americans were made, in particular, the stereotype of the "Noble Savage".[10]

The vanishing Indian trope that radiates through the dominant discourse, peaking in the early 20th century, is a white American construction that laid the ground for the reinforcement of the Indian enemy image and erasure of the good Indian stereotype. 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.[9]

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. The climate was indeed comparable to the 1910s and the War raging in Europe probably played a large part in the nationalist perspective the movie displays. But the use of such a film as an educational ideological tool implicitly made the Natives an analogy to being the enemy. In this context, the Natives could only be depicted as outright antagonists. 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 Natives, and the "savage" archetype in particular, would then correlate with the enemy abroad, both of them being delineated outside the realm of nationality.[9]

The effects of this bias have affected the recent portrayals as well.[11]

Several Hollywood movies continue to portray Asian destinations as underdeveloped or of being lived in by backwards, ignorant people. An example of this is showing elephant as a primary mode of transport in modern India.

In 1921, Paramount Pictures released the Rudolph Valentino movie The Sheik. The movie itself was a box office success but showed Arabs as savage beasts who auction off their own women. The film was followed up a few years later with The Son of the Sheik, which also portrayed racist overtones. Rudolph was even asked by a New York Times reporter once whether or not his well-off character could fall for a savage (an Arab woman). To Valentino's credit, he responded by saying: "People are not savages because they have dark skins. The Arabian civilization is one of the oldest in the world...the Arabs are dignified and keen brained."[12] In his essay "Arabs in Hollywood: An Undeserved Image", Scott J. Simon argues that of all the ethnic groups portrayed in Hollywood films, "Arab culture has been the most misunderstood and supplied with the worst stereotypes":

Rudolph Valentino's roles in The Sheik (1921) and The Son of the Sheik (1926) set the stage for the exploration and negative portrayal of Arabs in Hollywood films. Both The Sheik and The Son of the Sheik represented Arab characters as thieves, charlatans, murderers, and brutes.[13]

He also singled out A Son of the Sahara (1924) as "the strongest subconscious attack on the Arab culture of all the Arab movies of the 1920s".[13]