Assimilation

Reconceptualizing Assimilation

Assimilation's return is associated with significant changes in the way it is conceptualized, reflecting an updating to take into account the criticisms of the recent past. Earlier versions of the concept originated with the studies of early 20th-century immigrants in American cities conducted by sociologists of the Chicago school, who saw immigrants and their children, usually called the “second generation,” changing in tandem with upward social mobility and migration away from immigrant residential enclaves into better and more ethnically mixed neighborhoods. This view crystallized in the book The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups of 1945, by W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, which, however, added the jarring note that assimilability depended crucially on skin color and that, therefore, the assimilation of southern Italians, for instance, would require six generations. The assimilation of African Americans, according to Warner and Srole, was not foreseeable without revolutionary changes in U.S. society.

The concept originating with the Chicago school received its canonical post-World War II formulation at the hands of sociologist Milton Gordon in Assimilation in American Life of 1964, a book still widely cited. Gordon conceived of assimilation as a multidimensional process, in which two dimensions, cultural and structural assimilation, are the most determinative. Cultural assimilation is a largely one-way process, by which immigrants and their children divest themselves of their original cultures and take on the cultural features of the mainstream society, which are those of middle-class white Protestants, in Gordon's view. Structural assimilation refers to the integration of immigrant-group members with their majority-group counterparts in friendship circles, neighborhoods, and other forms of noneconomic relationship. Gordon hypothesized that in the United States, (a) cultural assimilation is inevitable in all domains other than religion; and (b) once structural assimilation occurs, then the overall assimilation process is destined to complete itself in short order. With this last hypothesis, Gordon had in mind the collapse of prejudice and discrimination against the group, a surge of intermarriage involving group members, and the disappearance of salient differences between the immigrant group and the host majority.

In this brief account, one can readily see some of the problematic aspects of the older concept that critics attacked. First, assimilation seems to require a complete transformation by the immigrant-origin group (a term used here to refer to the immigrants and their descendants), which must drop all of its original characteristics to become carbon copies of the host society's majority group, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Second, assimilability depends upon skin color, and thus the older concept reserves full assimilation for European-origin groups, which could be seen as racially “white” (although there were initially doubts about the whiteness of some of the southern and eastern European groups). Hence, the verdict of many critics was that assimilation was hopelessly racist and ethnocentric.

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