Assimilation, American Style

Universalist ideals, capitalism, a plethora of associations, and a love of progress are the secret to interethnic identity.

Peter D. Salins from the February 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Over the United States' two centuries of existence, the tides of nativism have periodically advanced and receded with changing levels and national mixes of immigrants, the onset and conclusion of great wars, and the vicissitudes of the national business cycle. But they have never been strong enough to overwhelm the irresistible currents of America's political, economic, and social predispositions. It is the combination of these predispositions and the assimilationist ethos they support that has made the United States, with all its problems and shortcomings, the most successful nation in world history in integrating ethnically diverse people.

The great hallmark of assimilation, American style is that immigrants are free to retain or discard as much or as little of their homeland cultures as they wish without compromising their assimilation. This fact is rarely recognized, however, in most discussions of the subject, allowing a misperception to stand that severely distorts the American debate about assimilation's desirability and possibility. The conventional judgment as to whether immigrants or their descendants are assimilating is usually based on how much of their native cultural heritages they have discarded and how culturally "American" they seem. By this standard, a foreign-born teenager listening to rock music on his Walkman, wearing a baseball cap backward, and speaking accent-free English is "assimilated," whereas an Amish farmer is not. But the social characteristic being identified here is not really assimilation, but what Milton Gordon and other sociologists refer to as "acculturation," conforming to superficial cultural features of the dominant society such as dress, speech, and etiquette.

Acculturation may or may not accompany assimilation. Usually, immigrants who assimilate-- or at least their children--become acculturated as well, but not always and not completely. Usually, acculturated people are assimilated, but again, not always. The distinction between assimilation and acculturation is crucial, and Gordon's decades-old insistence that acculturation is not synonymous with assimilation may be his greatest contribution to the theory of assimilation. Except for the need to speak English, acculturation, in the American historical context, may be meaningless, because it is unclear what it is that immigrants should be acculturating to.

Notwithstanding the continuing predominance of English cultural and social influences, African-American, Hispanic, Jewish, Italian, Asian, and other ethnic influences are now deeply and ineradicably embedded in the national cultural mix, and new ethnic influences are changing that mix every day. Even international ethnic influences, detached from any immigrant cohorts, are at work changing the American "national" culture. For instance, the widespread appeal of Japanese products, architecture, and food is largely unrelated to the direct influence of the small cohort of Japanese-American immigrants.

Acculturation, in the conventional understanding of the term, is largely irrelevant in a mass consumer culture to which the entire world is acculturating. Blockbuster video stores, multiscreen cineplexes, and Burger Kings are scattered across the landscape from coast to coast. Housewives in a San Antonio barrio, a Detroit ghetto, and a Westchester County suburb watch Oprah Winfrey or the O.J. Simpson trial at exactly the same time. Virtually the entire American population (and a growing share of the world's) has made at least one visit to a Disney theme park. Americans of all ethnicities have never been more acculturated than they are today. If assimilation really was the same thing as acculturation, there might be nothing to worry about.

But because it is manifestly clear that people can be acculturated without being assimilated, there is a great deal to worry about. Indeed, in most of the world's hot spots of ethnic conflict, acculturation is not an issue, but assimilation is. Religion aside, Bosnia's Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims are acculturated to the same cultural base, as are Northern Ireland's Catholics and Protestants. But the ethnic conflicts of Bosnia and Northern Ireland transcend acculturation and religion and would not disappear even in the face of mass religious conversion. They owe their virulence to the absence of all the other aspects of the assimilation typology.

Conversely, people can be assimilated without being acculturated. The strangely dressed Hasidim of Brooklyn, the devout Mormons of Utah, and the insular Chinese Americans of San Francisco's Chinatown are incompletely acculturated to contemporary American cultural norms, but they are very much assimilated.

Not only is acculturation not synonymous with assimilation, it can dangerously distract attention from the absence of true assimilation. That is why people in the United States cannot fathom the deep ethnic hatreds of a Bosnia or Northern Ireland today or the murderous anti- Semitism of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s that was unleashed against the most acculturated Jews in Europe.

One can see many exam-ples of acculturation without assimilation in the United States itself. Several of the Arab-born perpetrators of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City were actually highly acculturated to American society. The sister of one of the ringleaders is quoted as saying about her brother: "We always considered him a son of America. He was always saying 'I want to live in America forever.'" Here, obviously, is a man who, though sufficiently acculturated, was thoroughly unassimilated. His unwillingness to identify with the United States as a nation, rather than as a culture, led him to participate in a murderous anti- American act. Even Timothy J. McVeigh, the alleged perpetrator of the much more devastating bombing of the Oklahoma City federal office building, is, in his own way, an example of someone who is an acculturated but unassimilated American. McVeigh claims that he is only anti- government, not anti-American. But the research and testimony emerging since he was apprehended suggest a man motivated by hatred of America's ethnic diversity and of the American Idea's universalist principles that generated and legitimated that ethnic diversity. McVeigh's case illustrates how national unity--the key output of true assimilation--depends on the commitment of natives, as much as immigrants, to what Gordon called "civic assimilation."

On a much more mundane level and with fewer harmful consequences, one sees acculturation without assimilation among such immigrants as Dominicans in New York, who refuse to think of the United States as their permanent national home. Most Dominican youngsters in New York speak accent-free English and are very much at ease in the cultural matrix of New York and the United States. Their parents still speak accented English and Spanish among themselves, but they are far more acculturated than were the Jews and Italians on New York's Lower East Side a few generations ago. But as Luis Guarnizo documented in his study of the New York Dominican community, whether they are more acculturated or less acculturated, a disturbingly large number of Dominicans see New York and America as only a temporary way station--a place to make some money. They plan to return to their native Dominican Republic as soon as they have saved enough. In the meantime, they constantly travel back and forth, undermining the stability of an assimilationist social order.

The confusion between acculturation and assimilation is no mere terminological quibble, because the muddling of that distinction has been one of the most durable pegs on which the enemies of assimilation have hung their arguments for keeping the United States permanently divided along ethnic lines. In the 30 years since Gordon wrote Assimilation in American Life, there has been an explosion of studies on immigration, ethnicity, and assimilation in America. Many of the researchers have been dedicated to proving that assimilation isn't occurring, perhaps that it never did occur, and that such assimilation as may have occurred was a much more ragged and painful process than Gordon and other theorists of assimilation have laid out. By pointing to the supposed failure of assimilation, they have hoped to provide intellectual support for cultural pluralism and political support for the policies of ethnic federalism.

But the revisionists are wrong. By confusing assimilation with acculturation, they have missed two fundamental points. Ethnically diverse Americans do not have to be alike to be assimilated. And as the ethnic historian Stephen Thernstrom pointed out, "We can best appreciate the significance of assimilation in American history by taking as our standard of reference other multiethnic societies around the globe." By those standards, assimilation in the United States has been a monumental triumph, which is clear in how successfully the United States has functioned, not just economically but socially. The interethnic amity of American society, enviable by world standards, sustained for centuries in the face of an ethnic diversity literally unmatched anywhere else, needs to be explained. The only plausible explanation lies in the United States' unique formula for assimilation.

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