Race and the Jazz Age

• Racist caricature occurs in chapter 4 when Gatsby is driving Nick across the bridge to Manhattan.

  "A limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry'
• Immediately followed by a funeral procession going by, it's a funeral for an immigrant.

  The scene is summed up by Nick as "Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all.." Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder"
• Nick is most intrigued by the rumours surrounding Gatsby that he may have been a jewish immigrant or a poor migrant from the swamps of Louisiana. Immediate confirmation to the potential at Nick being racist or ignorant is his description and first image of Wolfsheim to be a "Small, flat-nosed Jew"
• Echoes Chapter 1 when Tom discusses the "Rising Tide Of Colour" and how the "White race will be utterly submerged"

  Nick has complex perceptions of race, and it represents the conflicting controversy in the 1920s surrounding immigration in America. Some believed there happened to be such a thing as a "Melting pot of immigration" and that immigrants moving to America were mixing with the WASP American citizens and creating a sub-human race that was dangerous and threatening to white culture.
• Fitzgerald associates Gatsby and his sudden fortune and sudden place in upper class society to corroborate with the underlying ideas of "The rising tide of colour" and the threat this brings to American society.  "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife" Tom supports this idea that Gatsby is not traditionally White Anglo-Saxon, reinstating his threat to Tom. Class differences tend to get racialised in the 1920s
• Black figures in the novel make for a sort of wry comment on the impasses of the white freedom and self-making.