Essay On Broken Blossoms

Following the release of D.W. Griffith’s seminal work, The Birth of a Nation, was an explosion of controversy over the racism in the film’s portrayal of blacks and people of mixed race. Since then, Griffith had thoroughly maintained that he himself was not racist and in righting his wrongs, he went out to make in particular, two films to show the movie going public how unprejudiced he was (Lesage). Those two films were Intolerance and the movie to be discussed in this paper, Broken Blossoms. Both flicks were in their own way an attempt to show the wrongs of racism, with Intolerance being a massive epic spanning multiple time periods all revolving around the same concept of, well, intolerance, and Broken Blossoms being a smaller scale, more …show more content…
At this point in history, the world had just came out of a Great War, and the optimistic rallies of progressivism had also begun to die down along with that war. In this day and age was a growing tide of intense racism, even more so than before, in part due to the release of The Birth of a Nation. And this wave of racism was not limited to blacks, indeed, the times grew so dreary that a term was coined for some of the sentiments present, namely The Yellow Peril. In fact, things got so out of hand that the U.S. government passed a law, with heavy public support, called The Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigrants from China from entering the U.S. (Yang). This law was passed for many reasons, most of which due to the concept of The Yellow Peril being so prevalent in the U.S., as it created a new other for the majority of Americans. Before, Irish and Italian migrants were treated poorly by the ruling classes at the time, but when asian immigrants began emigrating over, the fear of those migrants, who were primarily Chinese, taking over everyone’s jobs and everybody’s women essentially bonded even the oppressed minorities with the ruling parties together in passing that law