ABSTRACT
From the 1930s to the early 1960s, the dominant paradigm in the field of race relations in the United States was assimilation. One of the most influential theories in the assimilation paradigm was Park’s theory of race relations cycle. However, assimilation theories and the assimilation paradigm for explaining and predicting the development of race relations continue to hold perhaps the middle ground, between chauvinistic nativism and affirmative multiculturalism. Gordon’s theory may be regarded, in some respects, as the last major work on assimilation in the 1960s, before the reemergence of Marxist and neo-Marxist paradigms on race relations that paralleled the shift in the civil rights movement from an emphasis on desegregation to one on black power. In other words, assimilation and the American myth of opportunity and socioeconomic mobility are inseparable in the mindset of Americans, including most scholars who study race relations.
