Racial/ethnic relations: theoretical overview

Theories of racial and ethnic relations fall, generally, into three large groups: assimilation theories, power-conflict theories, and pluralistic theories. In the first school, assimilation, the supplanting of minority identity with that of the majority, is seen as both a natural and desired occurrence. Therefore, assimilation theories tend to see homogeneity as one outcome of the contradictions—particularly the social inequality—associated with racially and ethnically heterogeneous societies. Power-conflict theories, on the other hand, emphasize the conflicts among groups as they vie for power within the larger society.

Assimilation/Order Theories

The modern study of racial and ethnic relations can be traced to the early twentieth century with Robert Ezra Park’s theory of the race relations cycle, one of the earliest of the assimilationist/order theories of racial and ethnic relations. The race relations cycle theory posits that, through a series of stages, minority groups are assimilated into the majority society.

Park’s cycle is straightforward in its delineation of the stages of assimilation. The first stage represents contact between minority and majority groups. The particular ways in which groups make contact vary over time and place. Social push/pull factors such as unemployment, religious and political persecution, and war can necessitate large-scale migration of groups. So too, annexation, colonialism, slavery, extermination, and expulsion can initiate involuntary mass movements of peoples. However contact is initially effected, contact itself is followed by competition (up to and sometimes including violence) for scarce resources such as land, jobs, housing, services, and so on. Accommodation, a condition of relative tolerance in which the knowing of one’s place marks the status quo, is the next stage in the cycle/order. The intensity of group competition is dissipated in the form of getting along and the need to end group competition. At last, given the process of gradual acculturation (cultural and behavioral incorporation of the minorities), assimilation results in the merging of the minority group into the larger, dominant, or host group. What this process suggests is that the minority groups lose a significant degree of their cultural identity.

In actual heterogeneous societies, any number of factors might inhibit the linear progression of the cycle. Doubtless in some societies, assimilation might not occur at all. Nevertheless, the socially ordered character of the race relations cycle does imply the longitudinal assimilation of minorities.

Park’s stages were augmented by Milton Gordon’s perspective, presented in his influential work Assimilation in American Life (1964). Gordon begins at the assimilative stage and adds incremental definitions to the final process of assimilation itself. According to Gordon, assimilation moves through the following stages in this order: first, cultural assimilation (acculturation), whereby cultural/behavioral differences become increasingly minimized; second, secondary structural assimilation, in which small group and informal organizations are integrated; third, primary structural assimilation, in which larger and more formal social organization are opened to the minority. Miscegenary barriers, if they exist at all, are set aside in the fourth stage, marital assimilation, within which racial and/or ethnic intermarriage takes place routinely over time. Of such profound influence are the previous assimilative increments on the psyche of the minority group that, during the fifth stage, identification assimilation, the minority group begins to perceive its fundamental identification as that of the majority group. Consequently, the reciprocal attitudes of minority and majority are close enough that hostility and other forms of socially negative residues are essentially destroyed during the sixth stage, attitude-receptional assimilation; in the seventh stage reciprocal behaviors are subsequently of a positive character, in keeping with attitudes, and hence mutual civility is established. Eighth and finally, the assimilative process is culminated in a kind of civic assimilation, or confluence of interest, membership, and harmony. Amalgamation is thus presumed to end racial and ethnic conflict.

Many sociologists of racial and ethnic relations have been influenced by Gordon’s assimilationist theories. However, other theorists recognized some of the innate problems with assuming that full participation in society is the inevitable outgrowth of assimilation. As early as 1915, philosopher and educator Horace Kallen coined the term cultural pluralism to acknowledge the rights of different ethnicities to maintain their cultural heritage; in 1963, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the future US senator), in Beyond the Melting Pot, noted that, despite assimilation, European ethnic groups retained their identification with the home culture beyond the third immigrant generation. Most assimilationist theories had considered different groups of European, or white, peoples immigrating to North America. In 1964, however, Gunnar Myrdal, in An American Dilemma, pondered why these assimilation theories had not proved to hold for African Americans, concluding that the “lag in public morals” might make assimilation and enjoyment of full rights impracticable for that group. In his 1978 book Human Nature, Class, and Ethnicity, Gordon himself acknowledged that his theory does not adequately address issues of power and conflict.

Other theories have arisen to fill that gap, including the competition theory (for example, Susan Olzak’s The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict, 1992) and the “human ecology” school, which consider that part of the assimilation process concerned with the movement of groups and their competition for resources. Such theories paved the way for the more modern emphasis on power-conflict theories.

Power-Conflict Theories

If assimilation/order theories are designed to endorse the integrative and harmonious prognosis of intergroup relations, power/conflict theories address the issues of group dominance and inequality. Inherent in power-conflict models of race relations is the concept of one group’s having power over other groups’ identity and, in that sense, their racial or ethnic destiny along all measures of social existence.

Karl Marx can be credited with the popularization of conflict theory as part of the Marxist models of race relations. Despite Marx’s emphasis on social class as the most important unit of analysis in analyzing social inequality, with race and ethnicity as epiphenominal variables, the adaptation of Marxian class conflict theory to race and ethnic relations is commonplace. The blend of race and ethnicity as ultimately reducible to class oppression in the form of “neo-Marxist” analysis as emphasized by W. E. B. Du Bois (“Is Man Free?,” Scientific Monthly, May 1948) and Oliver C. Cox (Caste, Class, and Race, 1948).

Closely aligned to the neo-Marxist perspective is the internal colonial model (Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America, 1972), which determines that domestic minority groups and communities are exploited, oppressed, and otherwise treated differentially in ways very similar to the international, or external, colonial model associated with the heyday of European exploitation of large areas of the non-European world. Unlike most Marxist theories, however, internal colonialism sees racism and class (economic) oppression as two separate, if interrelated, dynamics. Perhaps the most outstanding example of internal colonialism is the system of slavery that arose in colonial America—a system that persisted into US nationhood and even effectively persisted, in many respects, beyond emancipation following the Civil War through Jim Crow laws.

Racial and Ethnic Pluralism

In opposition to both the cycle/order and the power-conflict theories of racial and ethnic relations stand theories of racial and ethnic pluralism, very often institutionally suggested by the term "diversity." Particularly in the United States during the 1960s, for example, the belief that relative social equality was tantamount to the desire of minority groups to become assimilated into the Anglo-American “core culture” was questioned via the various movements to maintain unique racial and ethnic identities while still demanding equal and global opportunity. The American Indian Movement, Black Power, Brown Power, gay rights, Asian American rights, and other dimensions all definitively stipulated that a person’s cultural roots should remain intact and sacrosanct. It can be suggested that the desire among racial and ethnic minorities (as well as other types of minorities) to become socially equal to members of the dominant group and to be recipients of equal opportunity is not synonymous with forfeiting an individual’s racial or ethnic identity and culture.

Pluralistic models include the idea of oppositional culture, or cultures of resistance, as partial antidotes to majority domination. Such cultures arise primarily among non-European groups who have not experienced the same degree of full social participation and civil rights afforded through assimilation to white subgroups. Ethnic groups who follow the oppositional culture model tend to be “bicultural,” asserting language and cultural traditions that stand in contrast to white Anglo-Protestant traditions: African American Kwanzaa, Latino or Asian American bilingualism, French Canadian bilingualism, and so on. Such cultural resistance or opposition has found ultimate expression in anticolonialism, such as Molefi Kete Asante’s Afrocentrism, black nationalist movements, pan-Asian movements, and Jewish Zionism.

The resistance to assimilation brings both benefits and drawbacks in heterogeneous societies. It is beneficial because it holds open the possibility that minority groups do not have to give up a sense of their respective cultural uniqueness and peoplehood in order to fit in and succeed in the mainstream society. On the other hand, it can be a drawback in that it constitutes the seeds for potential intolerance of other groups and hence a rebirth of social inequality and tragedy. The primary difference is that in time only the identities of the victims change, as do the identities of those who would make them victims of racial and ethnic persecution, for they themselves are likely to be descendants of minorities.

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