ABSTRACT
Beginning with the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s, the assimilation theory began to be challenged. The revival of ethnicity in the United States on a massive scale during this period came as a great shock to scholars and it showed that the melting pot thesis had to be revised. The new emphasis on ethnicity fastens on the ways in which groups and entities arise and define themselves against others. Ethnicity is one of the political and economic resources which people use in a variety of social situations to accommodate their lives in a given society. The "invention of ethnicity" as a status category within American society occurs in a complex dialogue between American imposition of ethnic categories and the immigrant rallying of ethnic identities. It involves accepting ethnicity as a legitimate category of difference, and then attempting to shift its weighting, either for a specific group or for ethnic groups in general, from negative to positive.
