In White, Richard Dyer says, “Brief Encounter is not about white people, it is about English-middle class people; The Godfather is not about white people, it is about Italian American people; but The Color Purple is about black people, before it is about poor, southern US people. I think the Goodfellas (1990) is not about white people, but rather about an Irish American among Italian American gangsters. Although most characters in the film have white skin, they seem to define themselves as Irish or Italian, or even gangsters, before “white.” Furthermore, in Whiteness and Ethnicity, Roediger says that Europeans became white by deciding they were white. I don’t think any of the European Americans in this film decided to “become white” because they still kept boundaries between Italians and non-Italians, for Henry and Jimmy couldn’t be a part of the family no matter how faithfully they served just because they weren’t Italian. Henry’s “Irish blood prevents him from truly belonging” and he remains an outsider despite his big involvement in the family.
Dyer also defines whiteness as a sense of order and rigidity, which the gangsters ignore and go against. Therefore, I believe no one in this film is white, although at the end, it seems that Henry has decided to “become white.” He is shown in a suburban home, as somebody who has to “wait around like everybody else” and “live like a schnook.” He can no longer live life in that ‘exciting’ and lawless way he did before, and by living like a “schnook,” I think he means that he has to live as a part of the norm, which is what living as a white person is, according to Dyer.
I thought a very interesting point that Paula Massood brought up in From the Mean Streets to the Gangs of New York was that New York was both utopian and dystopian—a place of family, tradition, and group identity that is also limiting and insular and where any form of border crossing is often life threatening. No matter how much time these people spent with each other and how many times they called each other “family,” if someone did something slightly unlikeable or out of line, that person was killed, or “whacked.” It was funny in a dark way that many of these men who trusted each other turned their backs on each other and killed them without blinking an eye. Even Henry, who was brought up to the position he was in by Pauly and Jimmy, ratted out on his friends in order to save himself. And it was ironic that the first thing Jimmy taught Henry was to “never rat on your friends and always keep [his] mouth shut.”
