Assimilation 101

1. Assimilation 101 Into the Melting Pot!

2. Today’s Objectives • Understand the patterns of assimilation • Analyze this theory referred to as the “melting pot” • Connecting new wave immigration w/ ethnic identities • A critique to hegemonic forms of administering difference

3. Assimilation • A process in which formerly distinct and separate groups come to share a common culture and merge together socially • As a society undergoes assimilation, differences among groups begin to decrease

4. Pluralism • Exists when groups maintain their individual identities • In a pluralistic society, groups remain separate, and the cultural and social differences persists over time

5. Assimilation and Pluralism • Assimilation and pluralism are contradictory processes • Not mutually exclusive • May occur together in a variety of combinations • Some groups may be assimilating • Others are maintaining or even increasing differences

6. ‘Traditional’ Perspective on Assimilation • Robert Park’s “Race Relations Cycle” • Contact – E.g.: American War of Expansion V. Mexico • Competition – E.g.: WASP V. Mexican/Indigenous Peoples • Accommodation – E.g.: Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo/Brown V. Board of Education/Civil Rights Amendments • Assimilation – E.g.: “Hispanics” make great salsa!

7. Melting Pot • “Every nation, upon examination, turns out to have been a more or less successful melting pot.” – Robert Park, 1930.

8. What is a Melting Pot? • All people, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, or any other myriad of differences, are able to become part of the dominant group. But what is the dominant group everybody is aspiring to? And are all people, regardless of “ “, allowed to be part of the dominant group? Doesn’t the very term dominant group suggest a minority group? And if there is a dominant-minority group dichotomy, than what is the melting pot but an illusion of equality?

9. Fillin the Blank -- American • “With the exception of Native Americans, ethnic groups in America are transplanted peoples, far removed in time and space from their original homelands. The necessity of adapting to life in America made assimilation progressive and irreversible. (Steinberg, 322)

10. Case study: From Immigrants to White-Ethnics • 1820s–1920s about 40 million Europeans immigrated to United States • Dramatically increased population • European labor facilitated industrialization • Increased U.S. military and political power

12. Assimilation and Ethnicity via Miscegenation • “Today there is an emerging consensus that the descendants of the great waves of European immigration have reached an advanced stage of assimilation. The most striking evidence is provided by the soaring rates of intermarriage across ethnic lines” (323).

13. White Ethnics Intermarriage Rates: Enter Euro-American • Germans – 53% • Irish – 65% • English – 62% • Italians – 73% • French – 78% • Scots – 82% • Poles – 84% • Jews – 50%

15. New Wave Immigration • Since the 1960’s, the United States has experienced what sociologists and immigration policy analysts are calling “new wave immigrants” • Contemporary patterns of immigration in the U.S. are largely composed by people of color • Asia • Latin America • Caribbean

16. Is Assimilation Dead? • On the contrary, “new immigrants are not only assimilating but are doing so at an even faster rate than did earlier immigrants from Europe” (323). • Patterns of Language • First generation – Immigrants retain native tongues • Second generation – children bilingual • Third generation – vast majority as monolingual

17. Assimilation Patterns • The importance of generations • The first generation slightly acculturated and integrated • The second generation very acculturated and highly integrated in secondary sectors • The third generation enjoyed high levels of integration at both the secondary and the primary levels

18. Intermarriage Among P.o.C. • “If loss of a native language marks the beginning of the assimilation process, marriage across ethnic lines represents the last (or next to last) stage” (324). • Asians born in the U.S. marrying non-Asians: • Vietnamese – 22% • Japanese – 31% • Asian Indians – 38% • Chinese – 46% • Filipinos – 65% • Koreans – 72% • U.S. born Hispanics marrying non-Hispanics: • 33% married to non-Hispanic Whites

19. New amalgam • “This is the literal meaning of a melting pot and a fulfillment of Robert Park’s prescient observation that every nation is “more or less successful melting pot.” Like it or not, and the dissent of the ethnic pluralists is clear, assimilation does appear to be progressive and irreversible, the inexorable by-product of forces put into motion by the very act of immigrating” (324).

20. The Black Experience • However, Steinberg points that the melting pot theory has been inclusive of everybody EXCEPT Africans and later African-Americans: black bodies. WHY?

21. “The problem here, as James Baldwin observed, is that the crimes of the past are used to gloss over the crimes of the present” (325). • Historical legacy rooted in racism; white supremacy; the plantation economy mentality • ¼ of all blacks and ½ of black youth live below the poverty line • Residential housing rooted on de-facto segregation-logic • Ghettoization V. white surburbia

22. Hegemonic-Approaches to Difference • “A person is of Spanish/Hispanic origin if the person’s origin (ancestry) is Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Ecuadoran, Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Peruvian, Salvadoran; from other Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean or Central or South America; or from Spain.”

23. Problematics of… • Erases specific-historical experiences rooted in colonialism • Erases cultural-differences • Pacifies/neutralizes political-identities rooted in resistance • Erases class experiences and neglects the many different linguistic, racial, and ethnic groups within different nationalities themselves • Indigenous populations • Descendents of enslaved Africans • Wave of immigrant populations from every country in Europe, Asia, the Middle East