Gangs of New York

A good review of the new Scorsese movie here, noting that it glorifies the Irish immigrants’ “struggles” while eliding over their incredible racism and brutality as they ethnically cleansed black people from New York for a generation or so following the Draft Riots pogrom.

they also present the riot as an outgrowth of the Irish fight against the nativists. The tone of what we see is, at first, celebratory?it’s a virtuous revolt, the Bolsheviks coming down the street?and then, as Union soldiers fire on the rioters, tragic. The actual rioters, however, burned down a Negro orphanage and strung up black men on lampposts and set them on fire (the orphanage doesn’t show up in the movie, the lynchings only in passing). It was blacks who suffered most in this tragedy. The filmmakers, hoping to memorialize the immigrant Irish as the soul of a new nation, went down the wrong path, then pulled back, only to end in confusion, halfway excusing an awful event.