ABSTRACT
This chapter expresses that Robert E. Park identified the 'ethnicity paradox': that is, that participation in separate immigrant institutions increased the effectiveness with which immigrant groups were able to compete for resources in the wider American community and ultimately to achieve fuller integration into its dominant institutions. It discusses two new concepts, 'ethnicity by consent' and 'compulsory ethnicity'. The chapter examines Park's resolution of the ethnicity paradox and locates him with respect to theories of cultural pluralism. It considers Fred Matthews's suggestion that, for many American intellectuals, 'alienated romanticism', by which Matthews means disillusionment with American society and what it has to offer, 'created not xenophobia but xenophilia' in the belief that 'fundamental meaning and protection from the psychic terror of alienation could come only from membership in historic national communities developed through centuries of shared experience'.
