ABSTRACT
In the United States, explanatory theories of racial and ethnic relations have been concerned with migration, adaptation, exploitation, stratification, and conflict. The idea of race and ethnicity being deeply rooted in the biological makeup of human beings is an old European and American notion that has received renewed attention from a few social scientists and biologists in the United States since the 1970s. Charles Hirschman has noted that “the assimilation perspective, broadly defined, continues to be the primary theoretical framework for sociological research on racial and ethnic inequality.” Milton Gordon, author of the influential Assimilation in American Life, distinguishes a variety of initial encounters between race and ethnic groups and an array of possible assimilation outcomes. A few have explored models of adjustment that depart from Anglo-conformity in the direction of ethnic or cultural pluralism. Internal colonialism theorists have studied the role of cultural stereotyping and ideology in limiting the opportunities of subordinate groups of color.
