We’re All Jets Now:
The Racial Politics of West Side Story
So Stephen Spielberg is remaking West Side Story.
Let me guess, Stephen. You believe that in the era of Trump, this classic tale of nativists versus immigrants — and about how “we should all just get along because we really aren’t all that different when you really think about it” — is more relevant than ever. Did I guess right, Stephen? Did I?
As everyone knows, West Side Story is a famous musical movie from 1961 which is allegedly a modernized version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But instead of taking place in Verona, it takes place in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And instead of feuding aristocratic families the Montagues and the Capulets, the conflict is between two working class ethnic street gangs: the Jets (who are white natives) and the Sharks (who are composed of Puerto Rican immigrants).
But this is an insult to Shakespeare and a perversion of Romeo and Juliet. The feud between the Montagues and Capulets was like a battle between Coke and Pepsi: two things virtually identical in all but name. That’s what the whole “What’s in a name?” speech was about. The feud seemed absurd because the two factions were so alike apart from the brand names.
West Side Story changes Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues to Americans and Puerto Ricans and in so doing tries to turn “What’s in a name?” to “What’s in a race?” But there is no moral equivalence to be found between foreign invaders and native defenders. There’s quite a bit more difference between Americans and Puerto Ricans than just what they are called. There are culture, values, language, tradition, histories, and more. And that’s not even to get into biology.
It would be more accurate to say that West Side Story is a Jewed-up version of Romeo and Juliet. Just how Jewish is West Side Story? Well, let’s see here. It was directed by Robert Wise. The screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman based on a story by Arthur Levine (writing under the more gentile-sounding pseudonym Arthur Laurents). The music was composed by Leonard Bernstein and Irwin Kostal while the song lyrics are by Stephen Sondheim. Even the goddamn choreographer was Jewish (Jerome Rabinowitz working under the WASPy sounding stage name Jerome Robbins). I was unable to learn the ethnicity of West Side Story’s key grip and best boy, but I’m just going to go ahead and assume that they were Jewish as well.
The only gentile to make any creative contribution to West Side Story was Shakespeare himself, but I imagine the great master would have been aghast at the grotesque caricature of his iconic play that West Side Story is. Shakespeare was not a universalist egalitarian. He was not anti-nationalist. Shakespeare wrote patriotic plays celebrating great English victories over the French. And Romeo and Juliet was never intended as social commentary.
By changing the theme from “What’s in a name?” to “What’s in a race?,” West Side Story becomes a fundamentally different story to Romeo and Juliet. It’s not a remake or a modernization. It is so divorced in spirit to the alleged source material, it becomes its own entity. It is too American and Jewish in its style and substance. “Shakespeare” and “West Side Story” should not be mentioned in the same sentence unless you are telling people not to do it.
However, the cast of West Side Story was almost entirely white gentiles. All the major roles were played by white gentiles. Even the Puerto Ricans.
Maria, West Side Story’s Puerto Rican “Juliet,” was played by ethnic Russian Natalie Wood. Maria’s brother Bernardo (also leader of Puerto Rican supremacist street gang the Sharks) was portrayed by Greek actor George Chakiris. However, Rita Moreno who played Bernardo’s girlfriend Anita was an actual honest-to-God Puerto Rican. But not as Puerto Rican as she appears to be in West Side Story (if you know what I mean).
So, yeah. All the major leads in West Side Story were played by white gentiles. Even the one Puerto Rican was white. I guess if the point of your movie is to deceive people into thinking that Americans and Puerto Ricans are basically the same, you can aid that deception by getting white people to play both. “Look, they’re just like us; they even have our facial bone structures!”
Well, leave it to Spielberg bring some real diversity to his remake by casting a Jew Ansel Elgort to play Tony.
This at first annoyed me. The character of Tony, in addition to being the white “Romeo” of West Side Story, was also an ex-member of, nay, a founding member of, nay, the guy who started the iconic pan-European White Nationalist street gang the Jets.
“Who the hell does Stephen Spielberg think he is?” I thought, “Casting a Jew to play Tony. Tony the White Nationalist hall of famer. The guy who started the Jets. That Tony. Sure, he fell off near the end, but he started the Jets, and he straight smoked a Puerto Rican in a knife fight. Surely, that part must go to a gentile.”
But then I thought about it deeper.
Tony did quit the gang, turned his back on his white brothers to go chase shekels as the assistant at the candy shop (which is also the Jets’ homebase). Tony totally violates the 14 words when he goes off running after Puerto Rican tail. Could it be? Now, just hear me out. But could it be that the character of Tony is in fact Jewish himself? Might Spielberg’s casting choice actually be the appropriate one after all? I will address the arguments for and against this proposition later.
But that question inspired me to revisit the movie West Side Story for the first time in well over 20 years, and like so many other movies, it’s quite a different experience to watch when you are redpilled.
All In the Family’s Archie Bunker was a character created by Jews to poke fun at white working-class gentiles. Michael “Meathead” Stivic was Archie’s college educated and (let’s face it) Jewish son-in-law who was hip to all the latest in cutting-edge liberal thought. All in the Family was about the clash of worldviews between the traditional gentile (as symbolized by Archie) and the new modern Jewish academic worldview (as symbolized by Meathead).
Yet Archie Bunker still ended up becoming a hero to the same people he was meant to mock. He didn’t have Meathead’s education or verbal skills, but who would you rather have a beer with? Obviously, you would rather have a beer with Archie. He may not know a thing about philosophy or political theory, but he’s also not going to lecture you over a joke either. Meathead may know a lot about philosophers, but he has terrible taste in them and no sense of humor. You would just rather live in Archie’s world than Meathead’s.
No matter how hard they tried, the writers of All in the Family could not make Meathead the hero of the show. He was smart but unlikable, and he didn’t do anything productive. Archie was the only person in the house who had a job.
And similarly, whatever the intentions of the writers, it’s impossible for me to watch West Side Story and not have the impression that the Jets are the obvious “good guys” of the story. Their grievances are legitimate and have the clear moral authority in their dispute with the Sharks.
And as a Dissident Rightist, you can’t help but notice all the parallels between the struggles of the Jets on a neighborhood scale in 1961 is a microcosm of what whites across the globe are currently facing on a civilizational level. While West Side Story was meant to be anti-nativist, a lot of its premises and themes surprisingly back up a lot of white nationalist narratives.
West Side Story begin deep inside Jets territory around Lincoln Square in Manhattan. The Jets, proud Aryan warriors of the white race, dance ballet (a fine European art form) through the streets of their neighborhood. This establishes right off that while the Jets may be street hooligans, they still have a European’s taste for high culture.
We arrive at the basketball courts, the Jets’ turf. Members of the white identitarian street gang the Jets are converged in one corner of the courts as other kids from the community play different sports and have fun under the watchful eye of their protectors.
Suddenly, a foul ball comes flying out of nowhere and nearly hits Action, the Jets’ resident Italian-looking hothead. The poor kid comes to retrieve his ball, but seeing that he is standing in front of the fearsome Jets, he is too scared or in awe to ask for it back. Riff, wise and level-headed leader of the Jets, gestures to Action to give the kid his ball back and so he does. The kid runs back off to play.
So already, we see a few things established about the Jets.
First, we see that the Jets are not sadists. They don’t go around looking for reasons to beat people up. If they did, they would have beat the kid up for his foul ball. But the Jets are not bullies who are going to beat a kid up for making an honest mistake.
Secondly, while the basketball courts are clearly shown to be “Jets’ turf,” they are being used for their intended purposes: as a recreational spot for the children of the neighborhood. If the Jets had a reputation for being bullies, kids would leave as soon as they arrived, but the basketball courts are shown to be thriving with activity.
The white children of Lincoln Square know that as long as the Jets are #1 on the block, they will be able to play in peace and safety. They won’t have to worry about any Puerto Ricans coming around and stealing their ball and starting trouble, because the Jets would chase those guys off. Jets are the real anti-bullies. They are not there to pick on kids or steal anyone’s lunch money. They are looking for rival gangs operating in their community.
The Jets are known to be dangerous men. The foul ball kid is nervous to speak to them. The Jets are mentioned to have already beaten two previous gangs who had attempted to move in, so he is likely aware of the Jets’ reputation and battles. But the children ultimately trust the Jets because they know that the Jets are on their side.
Beyond what petty crime the Jets may get up to (one is shown shoplifting a fruit), the Jets are benevolent hooligans. Maybe some of them enjoy the violence a bit too much, but generally the Jets brawl for their community and for the safety of the children of their community. The Jets are race woke and perform a valuable public service by giving the kids of their community a safe place to play. And if not the Jets, then who else? Because . . .
Police as Enforcers of Diversity
Then the Sharks show up. In the Jets’ basketball courts. Like they can just walk in to the Jets’ basketball courts and start playing basketball whenever they want to. Do they not have basketball courts on the Puerto Rican side of town?
Of course they do. But the basketball courts on the Puerto Rican side of town look like shit. They’ve got junkies and hookers all over the place. You can’t actually play basketball on those courts because you might step on a syringe. If you actually want to play basketball, you have to go over to the white side of town and use their basketball courts. And the white residents think that’s bullshit, because then white people are the ones who end up having to clean up after the Puerto Ricans. Eventually they get tired of doing that, and before you know it, you have junkies and hookers in the white basketball court. The Jets exist and were probably formed to keep that from happening.
But here’s the thing. The Sharks probably didn’t even like basketball.
Some historical context is needed here.
Nowadays we think of basketball as a black sport, but for much of its early history, basketball was seen as being distinctly American. Yeah, technically a Canadian invented it, but America was the first to take basketball to its bosom. But more importantly, basketball had no Old-World equivalent. You can point to similarities between, say, baseball and cricket or football and rugby. But there was no European equivalent of basketball. Basketball was all-American. American as apple pie.
So the fact that the Puerto Ricans were stepping on to specifically a basketball court and not a baseball field (a sport actually popular with Puerto Ricans) would have had symbolic meaning to audiences at the time of West Side Story. The Sharks are invading a very American space. It would be like the Jets showing up to a soccer field. It would be suspicious because, other than a niche audience, white Americans generally don’t like soccer.
The Jets make several attempts to chase the Sharks off their territory, but the Sharks come back to loiter in Jet territory once more. Two Sharks are seen playing cards, possibly operating a gambling operation. Things escalate quickly when the Sharks corner a lone Jet making anti-Shark graffiti. The Sharks chase him back to the basketball court, and then cut the kid. With a knife.
Later on Riff, leader of the Jets, says “This turf is small, but it’s all we got. l want to hold it like we always held it — with skin [meaning fisticuffs]. But if they say blades, l say blades. lf they say guns, l say guns.”
So the Sharks’ use of a knife here signifies an escalation in violence on the streets West Side Manhattan. While the Jets and previous white gangs settled their dispute through fist-fighting, these new immigrant gangs use weapons. This raises the stakes for the Jets. Should the Jets lose control of their turf, they would replaced by an immigrant gang which uses more vicious methods than the Jets.
The knifing incident sparks off a full-scale brawl between the Sharks and the Jets which ends only when it is broken up by the police officer Krupke and Lieutenant Schrank. After the Jets refuse to snitch any of the Sharks out to the police (showing that they do adherent to a certain code of honor), Lt. Schrank lets the Sharks go with only some strong words.
But after the Sharks are gone, Schrank gives the Jets a firm threat:
Now, look, fellas. Fellas? Look, let’s be reasonable. If I don’t get a little law and order around here, l get busted down to a traffic corner, and your friend don’t like traffic corners. So that means you’re gonna start makin’ nice with the P.R.s from now on. I said nice, get it? ‘Cause if you don’t, and I catch any of you doin’ any more brawlin’ in my territory, I’m gonna personally beat the living crud out of every one of you and see that you go to the can and rot there!
In other words, “Accept diversity or else!” Lt. Schrank has banned the Jets from defending their community. The Jets must let the Puerto Ricans into their territory or else the police will beat them up and throw them in jail. If they see some Sharks knifing a kid up, they are just supposed to just stand there and wait for the police. If they try to jump in and help the kid, the police will beat them up and throw them in jail. Schrank is ordering the Jets to surrender their community to the Puerto Ricans. If the Jets can’t fight back against the Sharks, their community becomes de facto Sharks territory.
The Jets are shown to be purely defensive in nature. The Jets have no expansionist ambitions. It is the Sharks who are moving in on the Jets’ turf not vice versa. They do not seek to ethnically cleanse Puerto Rican neighborhoods. They only seek to maintain white hegemony in their own white communities. And why shouldn’t they? Why should the Jets let a rival gang foreign hoodlums move in and start messing up their community?
Even if it were true that the Sharks and the Jets were Coke and Pepsi, equally bad (in their own ways) street hoodlums, an equal menace to society, the fact that remains that people would generally prefer to be terrorized by their own kind.
I would rather have Al Capone and his mob in my neighborhood than Bloods and Crips. Yeah, there might be a lot of gun fights, and maybe Capone’s guys might make me pay some unconscionable “protection” fee to do business. But one thing I would not have to worry about with Capone’s men is one of them killing me for being white.
One thing I noticed re-watching West Side Story is that the Jets appear to fear of the police more than the Sharks.
Later in the movie, when both the Sharks and Jets have lost their leaders, the Jets, under their new leader Ice, refrain from retaliating precisely because they fear the police. The Sharks, on the other hand, launch an immediate revenge attack which culminates in the death of white “Romeo” Tony.
Rather than be shown as a blunt object wielded by a white supremacist establishment, the police in West Side Story are instead presented as the enforcers of diversity. Their job is to make sure that the execution of the multicultural diversity plan goes smoothly.
The police have their issues with the Sharks for making too much noise and giving the diversity plan a bad name, but the Sharks are not opposed to the establishment’s diversity schemes. They are a nuisance for the establishment, but they are not a threat.
The Jets, on the other hand, are opposed to the entire diversity project so they are a far bigger threat to the establishment than the Sharks. The Jets seek to maintain white hegemony in their own white communities which is direct conflict to the establishment’s schemes. The Jets are the true anti-establishment gang, because the establishment (as represented by the police) is shown to be unambiguously pro-diversity. As such, the Jets have far more reason to fear the police than do the Sharks.
But Schrank is still a villain, because while he is an asset to the diversity project, he is not a true believer.
In fact, Schrank is well-aware of the brutal realities of multiculturalism and knows all-too-well that it is a malevolent force. In a later scene where Schrank breaks up a war council between the Sharks and the Jets, he says:
Headquarters hears about this, l may even get a promotion. Good deal all around, huh, Bernardo? l get a promotion and you Puerto Ricans get what you’ve been itchin’ for: use of the playground, use of the gym, the streets, the candy store. So what if they do turn this whole town into a stinkin’ pigsty?
Schrank knows. He is under no illusions that the Puerto Ricans are making these white communities better. He knows exactly what he is doing and knows exactly what the consequences will be. Schrank is a traitor to his people but not because he believes being a traitor is moral. He’s a traitor for a paycheck and a chance at promotion.
In a way, Schrank is the Jewish conception of a “Nazi”: a man who is very sadistic and evil all the while hiding behind a façade of “just following orders.” Whether your sympathies are with nativists or with the immigrants, both have reason to see Schrank as “a bad guy.” But ultimately, he works more for the benefit of Puerto Ricans than white Americans.
So the Jets can’t protect their community, and they can’t trust the police to protect them because the police are actively working to displace them. The Jets have to take drastic action and set up a once-and-for-all showdown with the Sharks.
With the system against them, a final showdown becomes the only way to maintain their turf. They set in motion plans to set up a war council between the Sharks and Jets and the plot truly gets under way.
If the Jets appear to be a proto-Alt Right, the Sharks appear to be a metaphor for black nationalists like the Nation of Islam. They are not exactly “with the program.” While the Sharks oppose the white establishment, they’re not exactly with the liberals either and can’t be trusted to “stay on script.” They’re a little too explicitly anti-American in their rhetoric, a little too anti-feminist, a little too overt about their opposition to assimilation. The Left want people giving speeches about hopes and dreams. People like the Sharks freak out the squares, and that’s bad for the diversity agenda.
The Sharks are especially opposed to American feminism and encourage Puerto Rican women to adhere to traditional Puerto Rican social norms. Bernardo tells his sister Maria that he would like her to marry a Puerto Rican and have five children. The Sharks seem to have a strong fear of their women becoming like white American women. And with good reason.
White women are portrayed quite poorly in West Side Story. Whereas the Puerto Rican leads Maria and Anita are charming, soulful, and intelligent, white women (mostly Jets girlfriends) are shown as dumb floozies. Unlike the Puerto Rican women, the white women aren’t seen in elegant flowing dresses or exotic costumes. The white women are seen as cheap, plain, and dumb with thick Brooklyn accents.
The one exception is Anybodys, a dykey-looking Tomboy who aspires to become a full-fledged Jet. When the gang was under Riff’s leadership, she had no chance. Riff, being something of an Anglin type, would not allow women to participate in White Nationalist activities. But Anybodys eventually earns her way in after leadership changes to Ice after Riff’s death.
But it says something that the most significant white woman in this movie is a quasi-transgender lesbian. So you could certainly understand why the Sharks would not want their women going down the road of American feminism. They would not want their sisters and daughters becoming quasi-transgendered lesbians fighting in street gangs.
The Sharks are male-only, but the Jets increasingly succumb to feminism after Riff’s death. New leader Ice admits the Jets’ first female member into the gang, and the Jets’ girlfriends become more involved in gang activities.
The Sharks’ view of America can be found in the song “America,” a duet between Sharks leader Bernardo and his girlfriend Anita. Anita and the Puerto Rican women are patriotic about America because it has given them great freedom as women, but the Puerto Rican men find the experience of being a minority underclass humiliating. They obviously harbor great resentment towards white people.
While the question West Side Story wants to ask is “What’s in a race?,” the question it really asks is “What is home?”
The Jets clearly view the streets of West Side Manhattan as “home,” but not so with the Sharks. As is made clear in the song “America,” the Sharks are emphatic that they consider Puerto Rico to be their true “home.” They only live in America because . . . well, I don’t know. For as much as Bernardo whines about living in America and how much he loves Puerto Rico, he never quite explains why he doesn’t just go back.
But whatever reason, he is very committed to keeping his people as Puerto Rican as possible. “Puerto Rico is in America now” says Bernardo, the implication that instead of Puerto Ricans becoming like Americans, he intends to make America more like Puerto Rico.
And again, why shouldn’t the Jets fight back against this? Why should they let their white community be taken over by a foreign gang that hates America, resents white people, and use deadly weapons? Who would want that?
Were the Jets J-Woke?
Only one time in West Side Story does an unmistakably Jewish character appear and that is when a Jet puts on a pair of huge thick glasses and does an impersonation of a “European” psychoanalyst à la Freud during the song “Gee, Officer Krupke.”
“Gee, Officer Krupke” is a clever satire of Jewish sociological and psychoanalytic theories which the Jets perceive as having already infected the legal system. It’s surprising that the Jewish writers would even put it in there.
The set up for the song is that the Jets are discussing what they will do if the police finally make good on their threats to arrest. Their plan: start reciting a bunch of Jewish sociological and psychological bullshit.
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke
You gotta understand
It’s just our bringin’ up-ke
That gets us out of hand
Our mothers all are junkies
Our fathers all are drunks
Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!
Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset;
We never had the love that every child oughta get
We ain’t no delinquents
Deep down inside us there is good!
In other words, the Jets plan to play the victim card, blame their childhood, and environment. Very Jewish explanations for why people go bad. But the sarcastic and satirical tone of “Gee, Officer Krupke” implies that the Jets themselves personally find these theories ridiculous.
Upon being taken before a pretend judge, the Jet is then referred to a shrink where Riff explains has bad behavior in Freudian terms:
My father is a bastard
My ma’s an S.O.B
My grandpa’s always plastered
My grandma pushes tea
My sister wears a mustache
My brother wears a dress
Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess!
The Jet explains his bad behavior to the shrink in terms of mom and dad and an environment of sexual confusion. Real Freudian stuff. The streetwise Jets have picked up that these Jewish theories now pull some considerable weight within the establishment and that as long as they do, they will cynically them if push comes to shove.
After being passed from the cop to the shrink to a social worker, the Jet is finally sent to jail. But before he goes, he throws one last Hail Mary at Officer Krupke “I have a social disease.” You don’t get much more Jewish than “social disease.”
You can read the full lyrics here.
So I won’t say that the Jets are definitely woke on the JQ, but they were obviously aware that radical Jewish social theories were gaining traction within the establishment. And they appeared to have some idea that some of these ideas were coming from Jews.
Was Tony a Jew?
Now, I don’t want to be one of those guys who reflexively accuses anyone they don’t like of being a Jew. But I’m gonna go ahead and be one of those guys for a moment anyway. Let me say right up front that Tony does not do anything in West Side Story that a Jew wouldn’t do. I know that doesn’t “prove” anything, but it is still true.
Tony is the Jet who shows the least ethnocentrism. He chooses chasing PR tail and making shekels over going RaHoWa on the Sharks in defense of the white race. Tony subverts the war council negotiating an all-out rumble (which would have been a Final Solution to the Shark Question) down to a one on one fistfight between Bernardo and Ice.
But even if the Jets won this match, they would still need the Sharks to keep their word to stay off Jets’ turf. At the scheduled fistfight Bernardo refuses to shake hands with his Jet opponent, a gross display of bad sportsmanship.
So the Jets had no reason to believe these honorless dogs would keep their end of the deal even if the Ice won the duel. The Jets couldn’t enforce the deal without getting thrown in jail. An all-out rumble, an everything on the table gamble, would have been best for the Jets, but Tony subverted the war negotiations because by then, Tony was motivated by his low, animal lust for Maria.
But then Tony shows up at the fight he bargained-down and tries to stop even that. He doesn’t want the matter resolved. Due to his meddling, the fight escalates, and at one point, Tony prevents Riff from delivering a killing blow on Bernardo. Tony saved Bernardo’s life, but then Bernardo kills Riff anyway.
I mean, you can’t say Tony did anything that a Jew wouldn’t do. Also, Tony is marked as special in several ways.
For one, he is the only white male in the film with a first name. The police go by their surnames Schrank and Krupke, while the Jets all go by nicknames: Riff, Ice, Action, Tiger, etc. Only Tony has a first name. This is perhaps a sly suggestion is that the way one gains true individuality is by being post-racial. Tony is the only post-racial white character and so he gets a name.
While his Christian name might imply that Tony is Italian, Bernardo in one scene specifies that Tony is a “polack.” Polish, however, might be code for “Jew” here. Much immigration from Poland was Jewish, and a Puerto Rican might not make a distinction between ethnic Poles and Polish Jews. He may consider both “polacks.”
In All in the Family, Meathead, a walking Jewish stereotype, was only ever referred to as Polish or “polack.” But Meathead never talks about, say, his Catholic upbringing or anything to suggest he is ethnically Pole. Meathead’s Jewishness is implied but unmistakable.
But even if Tony was just an ethnic Pole, that would still make him the biggest “outsider” of the Jets as he would be the only Eastern European of the gang. The other Jets are Irish, Italian, Ameri-mutt, or (in the case of the square-jawed Ice) WASP. Tony being Polish would make him more sympathetic and relatable to Jewish audiences as the biggest outsider.
The case against Tony being Jewish?
Well, Tony wasn’t played by a Jewish actor, but then again, the Puerto Ricans weren’t played by Puerto Ricans either.
There is also the question of why a Jew would start a White Nationalist gang in the first place. Tony is credited as being the guy who “started the Jets.” This can be explained that the group was originally designed to fight other white groups. The Jets are said to have had previously feuded with two other gangs: the Emeralds and the Hawks. The ethnicity of these gangs is not specified other than that they were not Puerto Rican. Presumably, they were white.
So it’s possible the Jets were not initially White Nationalist under Tony’s leadership but only took on a White Nationalist character when the Jets came into contact with non-white immigrant gangs like the Sharks. Tony did end up quitting the Jets, and this change of direction from civic to ethnic nationalism could possibly have been the reason why. Action says of Tony that he “don’t belong no more.”
The best argument for Tony not being a Jew is that he kills Bernardo in retaliation for killing Riff. For one brief moment, Tony stops being a cuck, starts being a warrior for the white race again, and straight smokes Bernardo. Why would a Jew do that? It’s got nothing to do with business. No shekels in that.
True, but by then, Tony was trying to bang Bernardo’s sister, so he would have had an ulterior personal motive for killing Bernardo beyond killing him for the white race. Was Tony’s lust for PR tail so intense that he would kill a man for it?
Look, I dunno. I don’t understand these desert people. We French are a people of lush rolling hills and sweeping majestic plains. The ways they think are very alien to me. But I would not put it past a Jew to straight kill a dude because he was trying to bang his sister. Call me antisemitic, but I would not rule it out.
I’m thinking Tony’s Jewish.
So who won in the long run?
If you look at New York City today, it’s clear that the Jets lost their noble rearguard action. With the exception of Staten Island, there is virtually no white working class in New York City. The Jets of New York were not able to stop the diversity steamroller. All the Archie Bunkers, Vinnie Babarinos, and Travis Bickles are gone. They all moved to New Jersey and Long Island.
The closest thing to a white working class in NYC are starving artists (actors, comedians, musicians) who are willing to do menial jobs while working towards their big break. But most of these people are middle class kids whose lifestyles are heavily subsidized by their well-to-do parents back home. They are not true white working class. On paper, maybe, but not in spirit.
On a more local level, both the Sharks and the Jets lost. These days, Manhattan is a playground for the rich, and you now need a six-figure income to live on some of the Lincoln Square streets the Jets and Sharks were fighting over. But the Sharks still found other places in New York City to colonize. They found places in Queens and Brooklyn when the white working class moved away.
And here we are in the current year, in the same position as the Jets were in, only on a civilizational level. On one hand we have a state which is flooding us with brown hordes and on the other, a capitalist system that wants to transform our best remaining real estate into a consumerist Disneyland with expensive foreign restaurants and bars with quirky themes. We cannot afford to fail.
But in the meantime, we can draw inspiration from the Jets, the men and women of Manhattan who fought a valiant but ultimately futile war against the forces of History. They fought the immigrant hordes sent to replace them and outwitted an establishment that had targeted their homes for diversity. Their struggle is now ours. We are all Jets now.
 The Jets are shown to be explicitly racist. They do not see the Sharks as a rival street gang that just so happens to be Puerto Rican. The Jets dislike Puerto Ricans in general. In the Jet Song, they sing “EVERY Puerto Rican is a lousy chicken.” EVERY Puerto Rican. As in all of them. Presumably they believe that white Americans are better than Puerto Ricans.