Contact and adaptation patterns

SIGNIFICANCE: Although no two histories of contact between different racial or ethnic groups are identical, all such histories can be conceptualized in terms of several primary patterns of intergroup interactions over time. An understanding of these patterns enables the application of appropriate measures to deal with any problems or to facilitate interactions.

Much sociological analysis of race and ethnic relations consists of defining, categorizing, and conceptualizing initial contacts between racial and ethnic groups and mutual adaptations to the geographic and social proximity that follow the initial contact. The following is an examination of some of the better-known theories and analyses.

Assimilation

In his now-classic Assimilation in American Life (1964), sociologist Milton Gordon defined assimilation as “the process by which groups with diverse beliefs and behavior patterns become absorbed into another culture.” He also coined the term “cultural pluralism” to describe the contrasting pattern of intergroup relations in which diverse groups retain important elements of their own cultures and coexist without assimilating into a single dominant culture. This linear model of assimilation is called the classical assimilation theory, pioneered by Gordon and sociologist Robert E. Park. Contemporary sociologists focus attention on the variability and complexity of assimilation. For example, Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou proposed the segmented assimilation theory, which considers the varied outcomes that may occur when individuals assimilate into different segments of society.

Two-Dimensional Perspective

Researcher Stanley Lieberson analyzed racial and ethnic contacts along two dimensions: migrant/Indigenous and superordinate/subordinate. All possible combinations of these two dimensions occur and result in very different processes of adaptation. When an Indigenous group is subordinated, as when Indigenous North American peoples were subordinated by Europeans who arrived in New England and moved westward to California, warfare is endemic; the Indigenous group struggles to retain its territory and its power in the face of foreign aggression. When an immigrant group is subordinated, as when Irish and Italian immigrants arrived to labor in the major cities of the Northeast and Midwest, the immigrant group usually assimilates into the dominant culture in order to survive economically.

Social-psychological Approach

Scholar Rose Stegner stressed psychological variables such as emotional intensity, polarization of thinking, and realism versus revolution in her analyses of race conflicts in the United States. Similarly, Herbert Blumer focused on psychosocial variables in his description of the development of prejudice. He viewed prejudice as a function of the extent to which the minority group is experienced as “different,” the degree of fear of economic competition, and the extent to which the minority group is viewed as inferior.

Integration Versus Segregation

Scholars Joan Moore and Marta Tienda both addressed the processes of integration and segregation of various groups of Latinx migrants into US communities. With regard to housing and economics, Puerto Ricans in Chicago and New York, Cubans in Miami, and Mexicans and Central Americans in Los Angeles experience varying degrees of integration depending on the characteristics of the cities in which they live, the educational and economic resources they bring with them, and the period in history during which they migrate. Although relatively affluent and well-educated Cubans may experience considerable economic integration, impoverished Puerto Ricans and Central Americans may be relegated to urban barrios. In his work, The Ghetto (1928), sociologist Louis Wirth described the process of segregation of economically and politically oppressed groups into separate areas of cities where they were confined by a variety of means, such as workplace discrimination that kept their incomes low, redlining of neighborhoods for nonservice by insurance and financial institutions, and inferior public education that limited the opportunities of their children to advance economically.

Multivariate Analyses

Sociologist William Julius Wilson argued in Power, Racism, and Privilege (1972) that stratification into separate and unequal classes is a means by which the dominant group can exploit the labor of the minority group. Prejudice and pejorative attitudes toward the minority group develop from biological or cultural stereotypes. Conflict often results when the expectations or aspirations of the minority group for economic or political justice are frustrated by the actions of the dominant group, particularly if a sudden gap opens between their expectations and their gratification. Conflict caused by such a gap is called a “revolution of rising expectations” and could be seen in the African American protests during the late 1960s, which many believe resulted from frustration caused by a rapid shifting of the domestic policy agenda for social justice into foreign policy priorities, particularly the Vietnam War.

Racial Protest

Protest in a host of different forms is always a part of the response of a minority group to economic discrimination, segregation, and the development and expression of racial and ethnic prejudice by dominant groups. In the United States, the African American community has produced one of the world’s richest literatures on racial protest. Historian John Hope Franklin, chair of the 1998 Presidential Commission on Race Relations, described the revolts and other protests of Black enslaved Americans in the South in his monumental work From Slavery into Freedom (1947). Historian Kenneth Clark analyzed the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in his book The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Talk with Kenneth B. Clark (1963), and Lerone Bennett and colleagues described the most militant Black protest groups that were also part of this broader social movement in Pioneers in Protest (1968).

Protest also took the form of organizations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909 by American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, and the National Urban League (NUL), founded in 1910, are two formal organizations committed to fighting legal and economic discrimination.

In the twenty-first century, protests continue to be a tool for activists and individuals to voice racial injustices. In the early 2020s, a Black man named George Floyd was killed by White Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on Floyd's neck for nine and a half minutes despite concern from onlookers. This event sparked widespread protests and demonstrations and increased visibility for the Black Lives Matter movement established in 2013.

Multicultural History of the United States

Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror (1993) traces the histories of Indigenous peoples, enslaved African peoples, “White ethnics” from Europe, Jews fleeing persecution in Russia and Europe, Mexicans whose lands were overrun and who later migrated to the United States, and immigrants from across Asia. Each group has a unique experience of contact and adaptation in the United States. The history and characteristics of each group interact with the times and places and ways in which they arrived in the United States or were subjugated by White Americans of European descent.

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