Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Assimilation is reemerging as a core concept for comprehending the long-run consequences of immigration, both for the immigrants and their descendants and for the society that receives them. This new phase could be described as a second life for a troubled concept. In its first life, assimilation was enthroned as the reigning idea in the study of ethnicity and race. In the United States, where the theoretical development of assimilation mainly took place, this period began with the studies of the Chicago School in the early twentieth century and ended not long after the canonical statement of assimilation theory, Milton Gordon's Assimilation in American Life , appeared in the mid-1960s. In this first phase, assimilation did double duty – on the one hand, as popular ideology for interpreting the American experience and, correlatively, an ideal expressing the direction in which ethnic and racial divisions were evolving in the US; and, on the other, as the foundational concept for the social scientific understanding of processes of change undergone by immigrants and, even more, the ensuing generations. This dual role inevitably produced irreconcilable tensions that undermined the social scientific validity of assimilation. As a critical sociology arose in response to the Vietnam War and to the deeply embedded racism in the US revealed by the race riots of the late 1960s, assimilation ... log in or subscribe to read full text