Welcome to the site, Cybershmuck.
An actual thoughtful question to me, at first, which was why I entered. He's definitely not anti-black, but I too have noticed a trend in his films--the black thief in
Taxi Driver, Stacks in
Goodfellas, and the overall lacking of black actors altogether in his films.
And I have to say I admire him for it. Too many films these days have succumbed to Hollywood and put black actors in roles which only stereotypes them (wrongly). Scorsese avoids this by not even including them in films where (let's face it) they normally wouldn't be needed, such as
Goodfellas, Casino, etc. In
Gangs of New York he totally missed out the anti-black riots of that time.
There's something I noticed in the past, like I said, some social comment in there somewhere; it's not racist, though. In fact, I'm sure I read something about it in "Scorsese on Scorsese."
By the way, you clearly need to see
Taxi Driver again. The black guy is holding up the shop at gunpoint, Travis shoots him, and the shop
keeper decides to beat the living (or dead?) daylights out of the corpse, while Travis drives off in his cab.
Mick
