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THE RACIAL UNCONSCIOUS OF ASSIMILATION THEORY1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2009

Moon-Kie Jung
Moon-Kie Jung*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Illinois
*
Moon-Kie Jung, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois, 57 CAB, 605 E. Springfield Ave., Champaign, IL 61820. E-mail: jung3@illinois.edu
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Abstract

In the past two decades, migration scholars have revised and revitalized assimilation theory to study the large and growing numbers of migrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean and their offspring in the United States. Neoclassical and segmented assimilation theories seek to make sense of the current wave of migration that differs in important ways from the last great wave at the turn of the twentieth century and to overcome the conceptual shortcomings of earlier theories of assimilation that it inspired. This article examines some of the central assumptions and arguments of the new theories. In particular, it undertakes a detailed critique of their treatment of race and finds that they variously engage in suspect comparisons to past migration from Europe; read out or misread the qualitatively different historical trajectories of European and non-European migrants; exclude native-born Blacks from the analysis; fail to conceptually account for the key changes that are purported to facilitate “assimilation”; import the dubious concept of the “underclass” to characterize poor urban Blacks and others; laud uncritically the “culture” of migrants; explicitly or implicitly advocate the “assimilation” of migrants; and discount the political potential of “oppositional culture.” Shifting the focus from difference to inequality and domination, the article concludes with a brief proposal for reorienting our theoretical approach, from assimilation to the politics of national belonging.

Keywords

RaceAssimilationMigrationTheoryNation
Type
STATE OF THE ART
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Fall 2009 , pp. 375 - 395
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2009

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