If we regard white color as the goodness and black color as the evilness like many discourses present it, as Richard Dyer points out in his article White, I don’t think Henry (Ray Liotta) possesses the properties of whiteness because he has done many evil things. Grown up in a neighborhood that is filled with gangsters, Henry develops interests in joining them. He starts menaced behaviors since he is young. As he grows older, he engages in murder, drug deal, and has affairs with many women after his marriage. His illegal and immoral behaviors shape his blackness or evilness, not regarding to his color but his dark inside. Jail cannot even hinder him from engaging illegal trades and jail is like his vacation place. After he comes out of the jail, he has no guilt at all and starts his job again. He certainly does not become white even in the end of the film because it does not provide enough hints to convince me that he will eventually become a good citizen.
Henry’s neighborhood is not white either. I think it is this black neighborhood that makes Henry become villainous. He finds being gangster is so interesting and identifies himself with a goodfella. Moreover, his father looks like a psychopath and tends to use violence. The domestic violence also has unhealthy impact on him.
David Roediger, in his article Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of “White Ethnics” in the United States, states that “Indeed at times of great identification with homeland and ethnicity, immigrants’ identification with whiteness was often minimal.” Similarly, the members of Italian Mafia in Henry’s neighborhood do not identify themselves with whiteness. They stick with each other and make money together by illegal ways, acting against the white dominant government.
Thus, both Henry and his neighborhood are not white since they both challenge the legal system and identify with one another as Italians rather than the white who came earlier to America.
