During the 1920s, Robert Park, redeveloped the work set out by Davenport and, to a certain extent, Boaz. He believed, much like Davenport, that racial traits were biological legacies which are coded into our blood, and can be understood by our interactions with each other and form a type of biological capital which explains the racial hierarchy that had formed in his era. With the development of rapid mass-transportation systems, industrial capitalism and mass migrations of cheap labor, diverse groups of people will begin to come into contact and develop a "race consciousness." He also believed the "desire to survive" would lead many immigrants to search out better developed and material successful nations. However, unlike Davenport, Park viewed assimilation as a successful way to absorb the new immigrants from Europe. His racial category of "white" incorporated all Europeans, whereas Davenport believed each nation (and at that time most nations in Europe were developed around a primary ethnic group), was a separate racial group. While Davenport's survival of the fitness framework sought to keep the Aryan (Anglo, Nordic, Teutonic "races") pure, thus strong; Park believed the natural evolutionary course was further mixing among most European ethnic groups in the United States and then the world, with Europeans leading the way. He developed a theory, concerning race relations, which was to resemble the nature cycle: contact, competition, accommodation, and assimilation. For Park, it was primarily, behavioral attributes, not biology nor social structures, which were the determining factor concerning racial relationships in the United States.
Will include book lists soon - SOD
Milton Gordon, in the early 1960s, began to reconstruct the assimilation paradigm constructed by Robert Park. He sees the assimilation project divided into three frameworks.
The first is, Anglo-conformity, for Gordon, this has been the dominant process of assimilation the United States' history. This was the assimilation process most Northern European immigrants experienced during the 18th and 19th century in the United States. The English customs and traditions the early U.S. Americans had kept from their ancestral homeland were understood to be, not only superior, but essential in becoming a U.S. American. German, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Irish-Catholic and to an obvious lesser extant, Anglo-Celts and Scots, were to take on the language and cultural priorities of the ruling Anglo-Saxon elites. This was also called Americanization. {Blacks were slaves, and would have no opportunity for assimilation, and when they were not slaves, they were to value the process of Anglo-conformity, but would never become assimilated.}
The second is, the Melting Pot framework, where all groups of individuals would melt into a new race of men. This notion of the melting pot was fused with the ruling ideology of Manifest Destiny which believed a new American race would rule over the Americas. For some, Anglo-conformity and the Melting Pot, mixing with Manifest Destiny began to look very similar, leading Gordon to believe that the melting pot framework to be a more "transmuting pot" where foreign elements were largely transmuted, thus not affecting the original material as strikingly as might be expected. In the end, both Anglo-conformity and the Melting Pot were based on the belief that the new group would melt its communal identity away and be absorbed into the dominant WASP referent.
The third is cultural pluralism, and for Gordon, this has been the primary process, at least for the Southern and Eastern European and non-European migrations settling into the United States. Although the 1920s, witnessed an attempt to establish Anglo-Saxon hegemony over the United States, with the Americanization Movement, there was a growing Liberal Progressive movement among Anglo-Protestants, which sought to establish a "trans-national America" where deferring ethnic groups could preserve "their identity and their cultures" and as "multiplicity in a unity, distinct from Europe," this movement became so popular, "Anglo" began to be seen less in American public discourse, and a universal American identity mythology began developing. This move by the "melting" Anglo-Protestants helped expand the category of "white." That is, while the trans-national American identity was being developed; newer Europeans found that being identified as a "white" American by society was much more important. That is, the laws of the United States sought to protect white men, and all of the privileges that came with that racial category, thus becoming a priority for the new European group. It was an imperative to be seen as white within United States society and its legal system. What Gordon fails to note, however, is that for all of the romantic sentiment surrounding a universal American identity, being recognized as a white American came with more material benefits. And as the definition of white began to expand, laws regulating non-Europeans to the margins of society were enforced.
Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan also believed the Melting Pot framework can no longer be taken for granted. In their popular book, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negros, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, they sought to explain the persistence of ethnic attachments and commitments in, specifically, New York City and much more broadly, the United States. These ethnic affiliations are all the more curious, considering that many of these ethnic groups have lost their after "distinctive language, customs, and culture" What was slowing the process by which various ethnic groups would melt into the "homogeneous American mass"? Political survival coupled with sentimental attachment, both Glazer and Moynihan argued, a brew of "history, family, and feeling, interest, [and] formal organizational life" (19) left these communities built around an ethnic identity intact. However, they were faulted for confusing "race" with "ethnicity." While "Black" becomes the "ethnic" identity for all African-Americans, all of the ethnicities that existed within "white" (Irish, Jewish, and Italian) were seen as distinctive and complex. Puerto Ricans, because of their Spanish and African roots, had occupied a very ambiguous space around the color-line within the United States, and were usually treated as "lighter" Blacks, an inverse of the racial category Jews held, prior to World War II, as "darker" whites. Additionally, Puerto Ricans were imperial subjects of the United States Empire, thus a radically different relationship, than say with European immigrants. Beyond the Melting Pot is limited to focusing on behaviors and attitudes of the particular "ethnic" groups, as the driving force of their relationship with the culture at large. Each of these groups have had different and distinctive histories within the United States, however the book wishes to treat each group as fundamentally similar instead of extensively different. Within the framework of the book, "separatist rhetoric" from a minority within the African-American community, was given much more weight in explaining the marginalization of the African-American community as a whole. However, it is hard to see how a minority within a minority would have so much power in influencing the structural system already predisposed, after hundreds of years of marginalizing the Black community, would be swayed by a handful of activists. And this is the problem with Beyond the Melting Pot, while recognizing the history of harshly regulating Black bodies to the margins, and recognizing the racism inherit in the system; the book still adheres to a naive notion that one's attitude and "moral" behaviors are the determinant factor.
Oscar Lewis buttresses the views of Glazer and Moynihan, attempting an explanation of the phenomena of poverty, both locally within the United States and globally. He lays the ground work for a social theory for explaining a type of poverty, which is so insidious; it keeps its members in a perpetual cycle of poverty. Lewis believed the global poor had a very distinctive way of dealing with poverty. They had their own structure and rationale, which became "a way of life" that gets passed down from generation to generation along family lines. Lewis believed the poor were, on the one hand, radically transformed by poverty, by dealing with the crippling nature of deficiency with the cognitive structures they possessed. On the other hand, the cognitive tools that were developed to deal with poverty have also kept them in a cycle of poverty. In essence, their cure has also been a poison. Their "structures and rationales" have formed a tradition of poverty, thus creating a sub-culture (this term is shortened to culture) which socializes the children with particular behaviors and attitudes which, in turn, perpetuates a custom of poverty. A permanent underclass with its own established norms and customs has developed, first, formed by a capitalist economic system, then continued by an underclass unable to develop cognitive tools to "get out." The ethnic groups who are stuck in the cycle, within the United States context are Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, primarily. While other ethnic groups, like the Jews of Eastern Europe are able to break from this cycle of poverty.
Nathan Glazer, Patrick Moynihan and Oscar Lewis become academic seers for the developing right-wing movements of the 1970s, for their research on comparative ethnic assimilation. It comes to prove the inherent cultural deficiencies and values each of these communities has for dealing with the United States' liberal democratic economic system. Since many neoconservatives' believed that, with all of its faults, the United States was an essentially just and equitable nation and with a very liberal culture, so it alone could not bear the responsibility of grinding poverty and exploitation. Especially considering many other ethnicities had successfully navigated United States society. This view would persist within white culture at-large and would culminate within the Reagan Revolution and the rise of the American Right. I will return to some of this, in the Symbolic Ethnicity portion of the paper.
The assimilation theory had gone out of favor during the 1970s, at least among those who had identified with progressive and leftist political commitments. However, it witnesses a bit of resurgence in the work of Richard Alba and Victor Nee coupled with the work of Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou. Alba and Nee, writing during the late 1990s, sought to revitalize the work of Gordon, by placing his theoretical mistakes within their context. Gordon applied his assimilation processes to all ethnic groups (and within his framework, racial and national are lumped in with ethnic) within the same experience of most Europeans, thus assuming that non-European immigrants go through the same process. He failed to recognize the fluctuating boundaries demarcating race, ethnicity, and nationality and the fluidity within which race operates within the United States. What is understood as "American" is contingent on the historical moment and Alba and Nee attempt to revitalize his work by taking these mistakes into account, when developing their own theory. If one were to understand the historical and social context of the ethnic group, while keeping in mind the dynamic nature the American identity operates, then understanding assimilation for non-Europeans is possible. A key-concept is "social distance," which is a prime example of the assimilation process at work. If particular ethnic groups perceive themselves to be close to the Whites, then their perception of assimilating into American society is all the more real. Social distance would also influence the ethnic group's relationship to the structural benefits of American society. In essence, Asians, Arabs, Latino, and African immigrants and those who study their experiences within the United States would take note of their social distance with the white power establishment, and then measure their "level" of assimilation.
Portes and Zhou, go further, by noticing there are many variances within the assimilation spectrum. Just as there are some who wish to assimilate with mainstream society, represented by a white power elite, there are ethnic groups which immigrate and assimilate to the inner city cultures. This assimilation process is precisely the opposite, of the now defunct assumption that assimilation is a linear and progressive inevitability. They see three forms of the assimilation phenomena, one in which the path to white middle-class existence is being followed, while a second form is the assimilation into the United States' underclass and all that entails, and the third is the rapid economic accumulation while maintaining and preserving cultural cohesion. And in this understanding of the assimilation process, Gordon and Oscar Lewis have become fused. Consequently, while Puerto Ricans and Chicanos have seen their attempts at assimilation grow ever bleaker, because of the close social relationship with the inner city and its tradition of poverty, Cubans and Punjabi Sikh are examples of successful ethnic communities which have set boundaries around their cultural priorities and engage in "selective assimilation." The Cuban and Punjabi Sikh both have opportunities within their communities which can promote the more "ambitious" members within the community, while still maintaining constructive relationships with "mainstream society."