Racism In The Great Gatsby

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Empires, which initially was modeled on Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 volume The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” (Will). Buchanan states, “the idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be ---will be utterly submerged,” which underscores American nativism in the 1920s. His nemesis, Jay Gatsby comes from unknown origins, but Tom suspects he is Jewish, as well as a bootlegger tying him to the Jewish organized crime syndicate. Jay Gatsby changed his name at seventeen from James Gatz (Fitzgerald 98), which is an Americanized version of the Jewish name Katz (Will). Gatsby’s status is considered to be ‘off-white’ (Fitzgerald 132). For “Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York” (Fitzgerald),