Race relations cycle

SIGNIFICANCE: Park developed his theory of the race relations cycle in the early twentieth century to explain the process by which societies incorporate racially and ethnically diverse peoples into one social entity. Park’s cycle consists of four progressive stages: contact, competition, accommodation, and assimilation.

In the 1920s, Robert E. Park’s theory of the race relations cycle provided a new direction away from pseudo-scientific racialist theories and toward more scientific views of race and race relations. The theory hinges on an assumption that assimilation of minorities into a society’s dominant culture is desirable—both for the minorities and for the dominant culture—and that it is also inevitable, proceeding through four consistent, irreversible stages: contact, competition, accommodation, and assimilation.

Park’s Four Stages

Park describes the first stage of race relations, contact, from the vantage point of Europeans who, as they migrated into new territories, came into contact with peoples who seemed alien in their appearance and behavior. Contact and conquest, according to Park, form a natural part of the process of building a civilization. Park admitted that, as European peoples migrated into areas inhabited by other societies, they disrupted the sociocultural organization of those societies. They then replaced the Indigenous social institutions with their own. He describes the processes accompanying the formation of the new social order as the unavoidable outgrowth of the migration, expansion, and amalgamation (intermarriage and reproduction) of peoples. As Park saw it, race relations develop as the natural product of migration and conquest; in this view, society is like a living organism that struggles to maintain balance, or “equilibrium.” The absorption of new groups, then, is merely part of the society’s attempt to reestablish this social equilibrium.

Park defined the second stage, competition, as the struggle of a racial group to perpetuate itself, or to continue to exist. Competition can be cooperative when it is based on a division of labor that provides people with roles that suit them. Competition can also be accompanied by conflict, however, when different races or ethnic groups are first brought together. This conflict can decrease over time as different people have greater contact and become attached to the moral order of the larger society.

Park defined the third stage, accommodation, as the inevitable result of the isolation felt by immigrants or racial minorities. They respond to this isolation by desiring to play an active role in the larger society. They also become aware of the “social distance” (the lack of intimacy, understanding, or influence between individuals and groups in society) that prevents their acceptance into that society. Driven to achieve higher social status, they become self-conscious of their differences from members of the dominant society. This social distance, according to Park, may last a long time, reinforced by established social customs and forming equilibrium. Eventually, however, social distance dwindles, making assimilation possible.

To Park, the final stage, assimilation, was a natural feature of what he called “civilized” society. In fact, he believed that a civilization is formed through the process of absorbing outside groups. Like other European and Euro-American sociologists, Park assumed that urbanization and modernization would break down ties based on family, race, and ethnicity. The breakdown of these ties, he believed, would free the individual to participate in modern civilization. Park believed that the United States was a democratic meritocracy—a society in which individuals could achieve upward mobility based on their innate abilities and in which caste and race distinctions would ultimately disappear.

Park on Prejudice

Nevertheless, Park acknowledged that assimilation, while inevitable, would take time to achieve. Although he held the dominant society to be a meritocracy, he believed that prejudice would hinder assimilation. He did not consider the difference between White and other ethnic groups highly significant. Rather, he believed that, to the extent that there was difference, it was attributable to the race prejudice confronting people because of their “racial uniform,” the physical appearance that they could not alter. Park saw prejudice against intermarriage as a particular problem because his theory required assimilation not only in a cultural sense but in a physical, biological sense as well, through intermarriage and reproduction (what Park termed “amalgamation”). Ultimately, then—especially for African and Asian Americans—the primary barrier to assimilation was White people's prejudiced attitudes rather than the inability or lack of desire of African and Asian Americans to assimilate. This hypothesis became a central premise of assimilationist theories and led to an emphasis on the study of attitudes.

The “Marginal Man”

Another concept credited to Park is that of the “marginal man”—the person caught between two cultures. According to Park, this marginal person is produced in the process of building civilization, as new peoples are incorporated into one society. Often racially or ethnically mixed, this person assumes the role of the stranger, fitting into neither of the two cultures that produced them. Rather, the “marginal man” embodies a new personality type, created by the processes of acculturation that accompany the race relations cycle. He understands both cultures or groups that produced him, but he is neither at home in, nor accepted by, either group.

Impact on Theories of Race Relations

Park’s theory of the race relations cycle laid the groundwork for a major trend in sociology: assimilationist theories of race relations, which assume the possibility of a harmonious “melting pot” society in which race and ethnicity are not significant determinants of social status. The melting pot theory influenced many sociologists who followed Park, including Louis Wirth and Gunnar Myrdal. These sociologists shared Park’s analysis of ethnicity and race, arguing that the assimilation difficulties faced by African Americans constituted an aberration—or, as Myrdal put it in his seminal 1944 study of the same name, an “American dilemma.” Even assimilationists who took issue with Parks, such as Milton Gordon—who argued that minorities were not expected to join in the melting pot so much as to meet the demands of “Anglo-conformity”—can trace their intellectual roots to Park. Elements of the race relations cycle theory have been applied to race relations in many areas, including studies of social distance; measurement of racial prejudice and changes in those attitudes over time; studies of cultural differences among those who have not been assimilated; and studies of the extent to which society remains segregated.

Today, Park’s theory of the race relations cycle is generally criticized for assuming that assimilation is inevitable. Assumptions implicit in Park’s theory remained rooted in later assimilationist theories: an assumption that the United States is an open, meritocratic society; an assumption that discrimination is caused by prejudice; the view that, upon their enslavement, African Americans lost any culture they once had and that they should therefore embrace acculturation; the belief in the inherent superiority (or, at least, desirability) of the dominant culture; the belief that racial inequality is abnormal in what is otherwise an egalitarian society; and an assumption of the assimilative effects of urbanization and industrialization. Spearheaded by the work of Park, assimilationist theories remained predominant until the latter twentieth century, when the Black Power movement and subsequent ethnic movements signaled that racial and ethnic minorities exist who neither embrace the dominant culture nor seek inclusion in it.

Impact on Public Policy

Park’s premise that society, to achieve assimilation, must minimize social distance and racial prejudice has been instrumental in the promotion of racial integration in education, housing, and work. For example, Jonathan Kozol, in his book Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991), detailed the social costs of segregation and promoted the concept that only when members of different races minimize their social distance by early contact with one another, as children in schools, will Americans reach accord through mutual understanding. Such studies helped give rise to the busing of African American children from predominantly Black to predominantly White schools during the 1970s. Likewise, public and private universities across North America adopted policies intended to end racial strife by minimizing racial prejudice through mutual exposure and appreciation. A more controversial policy adopted by some institutions involves punishment for the verbal expression of racial hatred (“hate speech”), with critics claiming that such policies impinge on the constitutional protection of free speech.

Numerous studies measuring social distance have polled American citizens on whether they would tolerate the presence of people with different racial backgrounds in their neighborhoods, in their churches, in their schools, and as members of their families. Results indicating that White individuals have minimized their social distance have been taken as evidence that racial prejudice has declined and that, therefore, the United States is moving toward an assimilated society. A number of sociologists, however, including Joe R. Feagin, have argued that racism is driven more by discrimination, which can be unintentional, than by prejudiced attitudes. Feagin and others question the validity of a focus on racial prejudice as the underlying basis of racial conflict in society.

More negative, even punitive, consequences of a belief in the value of assimilation can be seen in examples in which acculturation—the process by which culturally distinct groups understand, adapt to, and influence each another—was forced on people to minimize their differences from the dominant White society. For example, many schools for American Indian children in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (some run by missionaries, some by the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs) aimed to “civilize” the children by removing them from their parents and placing them in boarding schools where teachers worked to eliminate all vestiges of traditional culture. This pattern of forced acculturation is a good example of how government policy toward immigrants and racial minorities both drove, and was driven by, assimilationist assumptions. Park’s theory of assimilation, articulated in the wake of such government policies, echoed the status quo in American society, assuming that the dominant Euro-American society is an open society in which racial and ethnic divisions will inevitably be eroded and replaced by a true meritocracy.

Assimilationist assumptions in the educational system have also invested schools with the responsibility of teaching both the English language and the values of citizenship, important tools in the acculturation process. Feagin notes, as evidence of society’s emphasis on acculturation, the development of nativist citizen groups that promote “English-only” schooling. These groups insist that all children must learn the language of the land if they wish to participate as full members of society.

Assimilationist scholars have found ready partners in government policymakers as well. In the 1960s, for example, a report issued by Daniel P. Moynihan entitled Report on the Negro Family: A Case for National Action cited the “peculiar” structure of many African American families—dominated or headed by a female—as responsible for the failure of African Americans to be fully assimilated into American society. This family structure, Moynihan held, promoted values alien to those needed for successful integration into the dominant society. Some scholars followed this report by emphasizing that African Americans who have moved into the middle class have done so by virtue of their acculturation to the dominant culture; they claimed that racial prejudice is not the true barrier to assimilation but rather that failure to acculturate is the problem. In the 1990s, such applications of Park’s pioneering theory of assimilation were common among those who sought to end what they believed were “preferential” programs for assimilation, such as affirmative action in hiring and admissions to colleges and universities.

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