Culture’s role in assimilation and integration: the expansion and growing diversity of U.S. popular culture

ABSTRACT

Popular culture is an underappreciated site for studying assimilation/integration, though it can play a vital role in redefining the moral worthiness of marginalised groups. In the U.S., this role is highlighted by the opening of popular culture to ethnic Catholics and Jews in the decades following World War II, when these groups entered the societal mainstream en masse. Similar changes in American popular culture are becoming evident today for non-white groups. They are traced here in the film and television industries using data assembled systematically during the last decade by Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón. The cultural changes align with evidence of the socioeconomic mobility and social integration of substantial portions of post-1965 immigrant groups in the U.S. A key question remains the extent to which African Americans are benefitting. Yet, taken as a whole, the evidence described here underscores the ‘realism’ of assimilation and integration perspectives, which describe processes that are manifestly changing the U.S. mainstream and are likely to do so elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• Assimilation
• integration
• popular culture

Social scientists typically study integration/assimilation processes through analysis of objective measures of social status and social integration – by comparing, for example, the mean education of a minority group to that of the dominant majority or by estimating the rate of intermarriage between the two (e.g. Waters and Jiménez 2005). Despite their obvious importance, these analyses overlook the role of culture, and especially the important set of processes by which a minority influences the mainstream culture, which by definition includes the dominant majority among its creators and in its audience (Hirschman 2013). Cultural processes can do something that socioeconomic and social integration accomplish only imperfectly: they can alter profoundly the symbolic aspects of a social boundary, increasing the social esteem or perceived moral worth accorded members of the minority (Lamont 2000; Lamont and Molnár 2002). They can also enhance the minority’s sense of membership in the society and its mainstream. Cultural processes seem essential to the ultimate success of integration.

The U.S. provides a powerful a historical example of these processes at work, from the mid-twentieth century; and even a cursory examination of its contemporary popular culture suggests similar changes are underway today. Looking back to the mid-twentieth century, when white ethnic Catholics and Jews began to become part of the mainstream, one can see that the changes in the popular culture were a critical part of this integration. Prior to, say, 1950, mainstream Americans, Protestant whites of northern and western European ancestry, mostly viewed the Irish and the descendants of southern and eastern European Americans as lesser ‘Americans’ (Perlmann 2018; Roediger 2006).

This marginalisation began to shift during World War II when journalists like Ernie Pyle called attention to the critical role played by white ethnic soldiers in combat. After the war, popular culture reflected in novels and movies, beginning with those about the wartime experience, continued to include members of these previously disparaged groups in their focus in ways that suggested moral parity with the mainstream. The new medium of television enhanced this process: no doubt in part because it lacked an establishment at the outset, it provided numerous openings for newly ascendant groups; by the 1950s, personae associated with these groups dominated some of the most popular shows.

Today, the popular culture is changing again in ways that bring positive attention to marginalised groups, both those of recent immigrant origin and those who were brought into the U.S. by conquest and slavery. As Foner (2022) portrays, non-white artists are increasingly visible in many creative fields. In this paper, I will draw on the systematic research about non-white Americans in the movie and television industries conducted by Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón (e.g. 2022). It documents the transformation of these symbolically powerful culture industries during the decade starting in 2011. Once again, it appears, groups on the margins are reshaping the mainstream culture in ways that the dominant majority cannot avoid (Kasinitz and Martiniello 2019; Kasinitz 2019)

Moreover, these cultural changes are accompanied by important shifts in the social positions of some members of these groups. The cultural changes add to the evidence – convincing, in my view – of assimilation/integration on the part of significant fractions of non-white minorities in the U.S. The documentation of this evidence underscores the ‘realism’ of the assimilation/integration perspective and counters the argument often made by scholars adhering to critical theories that such a perspective should be rejected because assimilation/integration preserves the societal racial order (e.g. Treitler 2015; for Europe, see Schinkel 2019). In the U.S. certainly, assimilation is happening, even if not for everyone; to reject the perspective for understanding it means to refuse to grasp how it is improving opportunities for many non-whites and even transforming the societal mainstream. Admittedly, that transformation may seem paradoxical: an expansion and diversification of the American mainstream, tilting it away from exclusive whiteness, even while ethno-racial stratification remains evident for the society as a whole. But, as the data on changes in the popular culture reveal, it is taking place.

The mainstream and the dimensions of integration

I view ‘integration’ as approximately equivalent to Alba and Nee’s (2003, 11) concept of assimilation – namely, ‘the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social differences. ‘Decline’ means in this context that a distinction attenuates in salience, that the occurrences for which it is relevant diminish in number and contract to fewer and fewer domains of social life.’ Integration or assimilation (I will alternate the words below) takes place within a society with an established ethno-racial hierarchy, with a ‘majority’ (regardless of actual size) occupying the highest position and minorities below; and ethno-racial family origins typically determine life chances to a significant extent. Assimilation’s occurrence implies that these origins for some minority individuals have much reduced impact on such consequential matters as socioeconomic position and social relationships and their life chances approach those of the dominant majority, who are white natives in North Atlantic societies. Integration need not, though it can, entail becoming a part of that majority; rather than view majority status as the endpoint of the process, Alba and Nee (‘we’ below) posit that assimilation is better conceptualised as entry into the societal mainstream.

The idea of the mainstream is intended to solve a major problem left behind by assimilation theory as it developed in the mid-twentieth century, in the midst of another period of large-scale assimilation. The canonical account of assimilation from then, Milton Gordon’s Assimilation in American Life (1964), was written in the early 1960s, at a moment when the ongoing assimilation of the white ethnics was becoming apparent but its longer-run outcomes could not be observed. Gordon theorised that assimilation in effect would result in the absorption of minorities into the majority. This struck us as not a useful way to think about assimilation in the twenty-first century. In an increasingly multiracial America, it would require non-whites to become whites, an outcome that we rejected as extremely unlikely for many and impossible for others.

Moreover, looking back historically, we believed that it did not describe accurately the twentieth-century assimilation of the white ethnics, who remained religiously and ethnically distinct from the white Protestant group Gordon identified as the ‘ethnic core’ of American society. Of course, there were many ways that the ethnics became like this core, but enough important differences remained for us to think of ‘assimilation’ as having expanded the identities and ways that could be understood as ‘American.’

The key to assimilation in our view lies, as in the definition above, in the decline in the social significance of a social boundary or distinction. This decline can take place without the disappearance of the categorical identities involved. Certainly, during much of the second half of the twentieth century, the white ethnics generally remained readily identifiable to others – first because they often asserted what had become largely symbolic identities (Gans 1979) and second because of ethnically distinctive names and other social characteristics such as religious observances and schools attended. But while these categorical identities were often socially known, over time they had less and less influence on lives; in their jobs, neighbourhoods, and even family circles, assimilating ethnics interacted every day with others who were situated on the other sides of what were becoming faint ethno-racial boundaries. This observation has potentially powerful implications for assimilation today; and it became the inspiration for the idea of the mainstream, conceptualised as that part of the society where the influence of ethno-racial origins on social interaction and position is greatly reduced (Alba and Nee 2003, 12).

Lee and Sheng, in a paper in this collection, criticise this idea as vague, but I think it has over time become much less vague than they suggest. Alba and Duyvendak (2019) specify that the mainstream reflects the power of the majority, as reflected in societal institutions, such as the education system, the polity, and the media. But it also encompasses a variety of social settings or milieus where the presence of the majority is taken for granted. These of course need not be exclusive, and that is a story that emerges more clearly later in this paper.

Lee and Sheng make one other statement that is just false. They repeat the claim of Haller, Portes, and Lynch (2011) that, according to Alba and Nee, the ‘mainstream can signify anything from the upper-class to the minority poor … .’ Haller and his colleagues came to the idea of the ‘minority poor’ as part of the mainstream by an unwarranted extrapolation from a few words in our book, Remaking the American Mainstream. The claim was refuted in the paper by Alba, Kasinitz, and Waters (2011, 769) that appeared as a companion to theirs. It is plainly inconsistent with everything in Remaking the American Mainstream and in our writings (singly or together) since. It is disheartening to see such a baseless criticism revived in this collection, when it should have been properly buried more than a decade ago.

(Another note on terminology: As the paper in this volume by Starr and Freeland demonstrates, some now standard ethno-racial terminology does not serve us well because it is increasingly politicised – e.g. ‘people of color’ and ‘BIPOC’ – and greeted with puzzlement by many of those to whom it applies. Moreover, it confusingly layers a racial conceptualisation of difference – whites vs. non-whites – on that between majority and minority groups. The racial conceptualisation is flawed since a significant number of so-called people of colour are in fact racially white. This is true in particular for many Hispanics, who perceive themselves and are perceived by others in this way [see the data in Irizarry, Monk, and Cobb 2023]. To signal a break from a terminology that contributes to our confusions, I will introduce a modified term, ‘not-white,’ to refer to individuals who are not members of the white, European-descent majority group because they have socially visible African, Asian, Hispanic, Middle-Eastern or Indigenous ancestry, though they may be regarded as racially white by skin tone.)

In the past, social scientists, following Milton Gordon’s lead, tended to view assimilation in terms of stages. He identified seven distinct dimensions of assimilation, and his formulations suggested thinking about them in terms of stages. For example, he hypothesised that ‘cultural assimilation, or acculturation, is likely to be the first of the types of assimilation to occur.’ Yet I prefer to see the processes involved in integration as complex in ways that defy our abilities to lay out a precise sequence of mechanisms. Indeed, very likely is that there is no such precise sequence, that assimilation is accomplished through multiple pathways that differ from society to society, group to group, and even among individuals from the same group.

However, like Gordon, critical dimensions or drivers of integration that are susceptible to measurement and analysis can be identified. My concern here is with the assimilation of U.S.-born individuals, not immigrants; and so I presume that a substantial amount of acculturation, such as proficiency in the mainstream language, can be taken for granted among individuals who have grown up in the receiving society. Accordingly, I suggest the following broad conceptualisation as useful (see also Alba 2020):

1. status alignment: It is still common, though it is not inevitable, for outsider groups to occupy the lower tiers of the labour market and thus to appear inferior in terms of their social status. Integration, whether of the group or many of its members, requires socioeconomic ascent so that a sizable status overlap between the minority and the majority groups exists. This status uplift then means that significant portions of both groups become socioeconomic peers, who can interact as equals in economic domains (e.g. schools, workplaces, professions) and perhaps in other domains, too.

   The concept of status alignment can be applied even to immigrants, like many Asian Indians in the U.S., who arrive with high levels of human capital and enter the ostensibly more privileged tiers of the occupational structure. Often, however, their initial position within professions and organisations is less favourable than that of natives (American Immigration Council 2018), and status alignment means that the immigrants and/or their children advance to become peers of natives in these terms.

2. social integration. Social integration refers to equal-status relationships between minority and majority individuals that involve some degree of social intimacy. These can be among co-workers at a work site or in such non-economic domains as neighbourhoods, voluntary organisations, friendship circles, and families. Assumed is that relationships of social integration involve more exposure of the personal sides of individuals to each other – as occurs when neighbours enter each other’s homes – and hence engender more feeling or emotion – e.g. friendships depend on mutual liking (Jiménez 2017). These relationships tend therefore to conform to the ‘contact hypothesis,’ that is, they are social locations where group stereotypes can be unwound.

3. symbolic elevation. Typically, the majority feels superior to minorities in moral and other qualities – ‘we are better than they because we are more honest, more intelligent,’ etc. (Lamont 2000). The feelings of superiority are based on stereotypical depictions of minority others, which are to some extent defused by close interpersonal relations; these relations can alter the ideological or symbolic underpinnings of a boundary to acknowledge that many members of the minority have the same worth as the members of the majority. Such a revision in the beliefs held by at least a portion of the majority (typically an enlightened vanguard recognises moral equality with the minority well ahead of the majority’s mass) makes the arrival of upwardly striving ethnic-minority members more acceptable than it would have previously been.

Popular culture is especially consequential for symbolic elevation. By definition, it is part of the mainstream and includes the majority group among its creators and in its audience. Popular cultural change that advances integration involves penetration of representations, and other cultural elements, of a minority into the mainstream culture. The penetration that really counts is that influenced, or even controlled by, members of the minority. Sometimes representations under the exclusive control of the majority achieve some of the same effects, but often they are stereotypical, even when intended as sympathetic. Integration-relevant change in the mainstream culture is signalled by the presence of many members of the majority group in the audience for minority cultural representations and tropes.

This kind of change can alter the majority view of the minority – shown by the impact of post-WW II changes in American popular culture on the acceptance of southern and eastern European Catholics and Jews. It also can affect the minority’s sense of membership in the mainstream if they now see their ‘story’ accepted as part of the mainstream culture.

The state of US integration in terms of status alignment and social integration

We have substantial evidence concerning the impacts of status alignment and social integration on not-white U.S. groups. In the aggregate this evidence shows significant portions, especially among younger members, experience socioeconomic mobility and/or social integration with the majority. These changes are, however, not universal, so that many other minority individuals are left behind. The changes mean therefore that inequality is growing within minority groups; it is no longer just a matter of differences between groups. In general, the changes associated with status alignment and social integration are wider reaching for those groups with many second- and third-generation descendants of recent immigrants than for African Americans and reservation-bound American Indians (Abramitzky and Boustan 2022).

A demographic dynamic is helping to fuel these changes: it lies in the ethno-racial shifts between older Americans who are leaving the ages of economic and civic activity and the youth entering the ages of adulthood. These shifts are a product of two demographic forces: the large-scale immigration to the U.S. from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America since the late 1960s; and the aging of the baby boom, a huge, white-dominated group born in the two decades (1946–1964) following the end of World War II. The baby-boom cohorts, the first to experience mass higher education, have filled many of the highly placed jobs in the economy. But as these cohorts disappear from the labour market, they open up positions for others to fill. Since there are too few qualified whites to replace them all, this demographic process opens highly placed positions for minorities to occupy (Alba 2020). This is a kind of non-zero-sum mobility, much less likely than zero-sum mobility, where upward movement by some requires downward movement by others, to create a sense in the white majority of intense ethno-racial competition. The status uplift of portions of youthful minority populations to parity with a broad swath of the white population, combined with the declining numbers of whites in youthful cohorts, creates the conditions for greater interaction across ethno-racial boundaries and produces more social integration (Crul and Lelie 2021).

Increasing social integration is manifest in two sorts of well-measured social indicators, reflecting an increase of various kinds of relationships across boundaries. One concerns residential segregation, especially the extent to which members of different groups live in different neighbourhoods, not only separated from one another but exposed to very different conditions, such as crime, in their everyday surroundings (Massey and Denton 1990). For whites and blacks, the groups most residentially separated from each other, segregation has been declining gradually but steadily since 1970. The index of dissimilarity, the standard measure, fell to 55 in the 2020 Census, which is still quite high (Logan and Stults 2021). However, it appears that, for African Americans, residence outside of heavily black neighbourhoods is increasingly a function of social class, with many middle-class African Americans living in integrated circumstances, while poorer blacks remain intensely segregated (Sharkey 2014; Lichter, Thiede, and Brooks 2023).

For the two other large minorities, Asians and Hispanics, the story is distinctive because of large-scale immigration. Their segregation indices are lower than the white–black one and have been stable for some time, although the 2020 Census has the segregation index between Hispanics and whites dipping to 45 from 50 at the turn of the century (the high undercount of Hispanics in 2020 could be part of the explanation, since the undercount presumably missed many legally vulnerable Hispanic households, also undoubtedly the most segregated). The segregation between Asians and whites has stayed stable at about 40 for decades.

There is a dynamic process hidden behind this apparent stability. Given the strong immigration flows from Asia and Latin America, the segregation indices should be rising over time because immigrants tend to settle initially in areas with many co-ethnics. The stability of the indices reveals an outflow from immigrant neighbourhoods into more integrated ones, often those with many white residents (Alba et al. 2014; Iceland 2009). This outflow is especially marked among the U.S.-born generations.

Increasing integration is evident when we look at where whites live. In 2020, nearly a third (31%) of the residents of the neighbourhood of the average white were not white (Logan and Stults 2021). This fraction continues to rise: in 2000, it was a fifth (20%). To be sure, because of segregation, it is below the fraction of the population that is not white. This disparity emphasises the selective character of residential integration, which underrepresents poor non-whites, as well as most immigrant families, found in enclaves.

Another domain where social integration is evident is the family, and again it is selective in nature. One of the emblematic social changes since the last century is the increasing mixing across ethno-racial boundaries within families. The rate of intermarriage is a principal indicator of this, even though not all families are formed through marriage. Today, about one in five (19%) of new marriages involve partners from different major ethno-racial backgrounds. This is a momentous change from the Civil Rights period, when the comparable figures was only 3% (Livingston and Brown 2017) and a major one even compared to 2000, when it was 8% of new marriages. In the great majority of intermarriages – about 80% – one of the partners is white. In other words, most intermarriages unite partners across the primary ethno-racial cleavage in the U.S., between whites and not-whites.

The increasing mixing in families is having a profound effect on the child population, as the number of children growing up in mixed families, where one parent and some relatives are white and the other parent and other relatives are not, is surging. Today, about one in nine babies is born into such a family, and another 4% is born into some other kind of mixed family background (Alba and Maggio 2022). The group of mixed Americans is increasing rapidly, as the 2020 census data appear to show (though, because of methodological changes in the census, the 2020 data overstate this growth [Levy, Alba, and Myers 2021]). Given the declining size of whites among young adults, the group of mixed, partly white Americans seems certain to continue to expand.

The labour market is the site of other prominent changes, which reflect mobility into the top tiers of the occupational structure by numerous Americans with not-white family backgrounds. This mobility is another manifestation of the demographic dynamic discussed above. For much of the twentieth century, whites monopolised the best jobs. That is no longer the case, as younger workers in these positions increasingly have not-white (or partly not-white) origins.

For an empirical demonstration, one need only look at the top quartile of the workforce, defined as the incumbents of the best-paid occupations that account for a quarter of full-time workers (see Alba 2020; Alba and Maggio 2022). In 2000, nearly nine-tenths (86 percent) of the oldest incumbents (ages 56-65) of these occupations were whites (to be precise in census terms: non-Hispanic and only white by race¹). Among the youngest incumbents (ages 26-35), the proportion was down to nearly six-tenths (62 percent). The age gradient in minority representation implies a transformation of the upper tiers over time as older, more white birth cohorts leave the workforce and are replaced by younger, more diverse ones that are aging into place.

This process, I want to underscore, does not mean that ethno-racial stratification is in steep decline. An examination of population-based probabilities (see Alba and Maggio [2022] for the details) of attaining a top-quartile job reveals the stable and sharp inequalities one would expect. Unmixed Hispanics, Blacks, and Native Americans, in that order, have the lowest probabilities. But whites do not have the highest probability: Asians do, and their probability is the only one changing markedly over time (it is increasing). In second place come individuals who are mixed Asian and white; and then come unmixed whites. In general, the mixed white-minority categories have probabilities closer to those of whites than the equivalent minority categories do. The Hispanic-white probability, of particular importance because of the large size of this mixed group, is almost the same as that of whites. (Moreover, the members of that category in the top quartile are distributed across its occupations very similarly to unmixed whites, suggesting that they are being treated like whites in the labour market.)

So far, the probabilities of a top-quartile job associated with ethno-racial origins are quite stable (with, as noted, the exception of Asians). Even with stable probabilities, though, the diversity of those taking top-quartile jobs will grow because the younger cohorts coming of age generally are more ethno-racially diverse than slightly older ones. This dynamic holds especially for mixed individuals, who have higher probabilities in the first place and stronger growth across cohorts, in the second. The entry of so many individuals with not-white origins into the top quartile will inevitably bring with it greater diversity among those with hiring power. This could imply that the probabilities associated with those origins will improve over time. We will have to see.

Ideas about the role of culture for integration

Culture has long been thought to play a role in integration. The major strand of that thinking has concerned cultural changes on the part of integrating minorities, usually discussed under the topic of ‘acculturation.’ Acculturation is especially relevant for any discussion of the integration of immigrant minorities, who generally undertake numerous accommodations – most obviously, in language and many externals such as dress – in order to be able to function in the receiving society. Changes begin in the immigrant generation and take a large step by the second generation since it grows up in the receiving society, although it may also spend time in the parental homeland (Smith 2006). The extent to which and the ways by which later generations of immigrant populations remain culturally distinctive from the societal majority are important questions, but ones that do not occupy me here. Based on a two-way conception of cultural change, my interest is in the other direction, that of integrating minorities on the larger society.

Culture also has long been thought to affect the prospects for social mobility. One important theoretical thread, associated with Pierre Bourdieu (1984), is the idea of cultural capital: specifically, that privileged groups draw on cultural features, such as the ‘proper’ speech accent or knowledge about certain domains of the arts, to restrict access to the opportunities they hoard and achieve social closure (Tilly 1998). Cultural capital in the form of appreciation of the arts has been shown to be rewarded in educational settings and in the marriage market (DiMaggio 1982; DiMaggio and Mohr 1985).

According to another thread, a research tradition that has faded but probably deserves to return, minority cultural dispositions, such as attitudes and values, have been viewed in terms of their ability to help or hinder mobility within the institutional structures of the mainstream society. This perspective gave rise to a large literature in the middle of the twentieth century that compared the achievements of the second generations of the last wave of European immigrant groups. In a well-known article of that time, Bernard Rosen (1959) compared groups in terms of the ‘psychological and cultural orientations towards achievement … achievement motivation, achievement values, and educational-occupational aspirations.’ This literature frequently emphasised the mobility disparities between the Catholic groups, most notably the Italians (mainly from the economically less developed Italian south), and eastern European Jews (Rosen 1959). These disparities undoubtedly had a cultural component, but this was not the only relevant difference: as Stephen Steinberg (1987) subsequently demonstrated, Jews were unusual in terms of the entrepreneurial backgrounds of many immigrants, who also possessed greater literacy and many industrially relevant skills acquired in Europe, whereas the Italians had educational and economic orientations and skills acquired largely in rural occupations. Indeed, Jewish achievements were exceptional by any standard. By the third-generation, however, the Italians had caught up to mainstream whites in educational and occupational terms, indicating that culturally induced disadvantages are probably not permanent.

The importance of this faded research tradition for the contemporary study of inequality lies its assumption that characteristics of immigrant groups, shaped by their experiences prior to arrival, have relevance for their integration, at least for a few generations. By contrast, today’s prevalent race-based theories tend to see inequalities as originating in the power relations among groups in the American setting. A contemporary example relates to the issue of a possible ‘bamboo ceiling’ for Asian Americans, viewed as a form of racist limitation (see Chin 2020). However, Lu, Nisbett, and Morris (2020) argue that this issue affects East Asians but not South Asians and is one of ‘cultural fit.’ That is, the family and communal cultures of South Asians emphasise assertiveness, whereas those of East Asians discourage it (as Chin also shows in discussing the ‘playbook’ taught to the second generation by immigrant parents). Despite the greater prejudice that they face, South Asian are well represented in leadership positions in the U.S. (at rates higher than is the case for whites), while East Asian are underrepresented. One caution is required, however: The East Asian immigrant generation has been often held back by imperfect mastery of English, which is much less true of the South Asian immigrants, who in the case of Indians are moreover often of elite, Brahmin origin. The true test of East Asian entrance to the leadership level lies in the ultimate achievements of the second generation, and its members are still too young for the most part to assess their prospects adequately. Still, this entire discussion demonstrates the relevance of group characteristics, including culture for mobility chances.

The focus of my interest in this paper is on another aspect of culture’s relation to assimilation: the impact of a minority group on the popular culture of the mainstream and the role it can play in integration. Of course, a few influences are readily achieved and evident in many societies with minority groups. This is true particularly of food, where the presence of minority groups is made generally apparent in public space by restaurants and their signage (Diaz and Ore 2022). Many culinary manifestations of a minority cultural presence, often altered to agree better with the tastes of the majority, can be enjoyed readily by its members – as is true of the döner in Germany or Chinese or Mexican food in general in the U.S. This enjoyment may be used by some of the native white majority as a signal of mild sympathetic alliance with minorities. However, a deeper effect on integration seems uncertain.

This deeper effect is more likely to be associated with forms of culture that involve representations of minority individuals and themes concerned with the group’s experiences. I have in mind here such forms as music, novels, films, and television. In these domains, especially the last three, individuals from the minority can be depicted as full human beings in all their variety, bringing them out from behind the curtain of majority-group stereotypes. These representations can give others a more sympathetic understanding of the experiences and behaviour of minority individuals and can over time alter the moral evaluation of them by the majority, especially at a moment when social contacts across group boundaries are increasing. The most effective cultural domains in these respects are those so ubiquitous that they are hard for members of the majority to avoid and where members of the minority have at least some degree of influence over the representations in them. This seems most true of cinema and television, and above all of the latter.

Popular cultural changes and assimilation during the second half of the twentieth century

The mass assimilation of the so-called white ethnics, who were mainly Catholic and Jewish descendants of turn-of-the-twentieth century immigrants from southern and eastern Europe along with the Irish, illustrates the potent role of popular cultural change for integration processes. This assimilation was concentrated in the quarter century following the end of World War II. Cultural change in this period was both an indicator of integration but also undoubtedly spurred it by creating sympathetic familiarity with the groups that were at the mainstream margins at the outset.

The 1920s had witnessed the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which featured marches by hooded men in northern cities, who were as much concerned with non-Protestant immigrants as with African Americans. The decade ended with the decisive defeat of the first Catholic major-party candidate for the Presidency, Al Smith, who was viewed by many white Protestants as a potential subverter of the country’s democracy because of his presumed susceptibility to the influence of the Pope.

As the 1940s began, the mainstream was dominated by Protestants with ancestry from northern and western Europe, and especially from Britain (the so-called WASPs). The United States was conceived by them as fundamentally a white Christian nation (Catholics excluded). Even a liberal like President Franklin Roosevelt could openly express a genteel version of white Protestant dominance when he told Leo Crowley, an Irish Catholic New Deal official, in 1941 ‘Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance. It is up to you to go along with anything I want’ (Gerstle 2001, 185).

The marginalisation of white ethnics by those in the Protestant mainstream began to soften during the war. It was critical to the war effort to inspire a sense of national solidarity that could include the white ethnics, especially those with ancestral ties to enemy nations, particularly Germany and Italy. Though the American military was segregated racially, it was not segregated by religion or ethnicity. There was in addition a self-conscious effort to highlight the contributions made by the white ethnics to American fighting forces. Propagandistic films made during the war portrayed the frontline military units as a cross-section of the white population, as did the wartime reporting of journalists such as Ernie Pyle.

The wartime experience prepared the way for a transformation of the popular culture during the ensuing decades. Americans were still digesting the wartime experience in its immediate aftermath. A spate of novels, many of them made into successful films (e.g. A Bell for Adano, The Naked and the Dead, A Walk in the Sun, From Here to Eternity), continued to highlight ethnic diversity among whites in the military. This literature also marks the initial popular success of an author from the new groups, Normal Mailer, who was Jewish.

The advent of television greatly expanded the visibility of the ethnics in the mainstream culture. To be sure, there was an ethnic presence on radio in the prior decades. But popular radio shows with ethnic settings, like Fibber McGee and Molly (set in an Irish-American family), tended to make their characters, who were often voiced by non-ethnic actors, an object of humour (Wikipedia 2022a). Television by contrast presented sympathetic entertainers from ethnic backgrounds that were central to their personae; and several of them dominated the small screen during 1950s.

Three eponymous television shows illustrate the transformation of popular culture during the post-war decades to reveal the ethnics as worthy of the mainstream: The Jackie Gleason Show, The Milton Berle Show (aka Texaco Star Theatre), and The Perry Como Show (Wikipedia 2022b, 2022c, 2022d). These were enormously popular shows that competed for top positions in popularity charts. They were not initially named after their stars but were renamed when their luminescence became apparent. Gleason, the child of an Irish immigrant mother and an Irish American father, was a comedian with a repertoire of regularly appearing characters, most famously the bus driver Ralph Kramden in the multi-character skit, the Honeymooners. Como, the child of Italian immigrants who grew up speaking Italian at home, was a crooner in the style of Bing Crosby. The most popular of all in the early 1950s was Milton Berle, born Mendel Berlinger, whose show at one point achieved a virtually universal audience during its weekly hour. Berle was widely accorded the sobriquet ‘Mr. Television’ and affectionately known to children as ‘Uncle Miltie.’ A witticism of the time was that, at the end of his show, local water systems throughout the country experienced an acute loss of pressure because so many viewers got up to use the bathroom at the same moment.

Yet it is false to think that the process of mainstream integration ran entirely smoothly. Even while the transformation of popular culture took place, resistance to the mainstream entry of key white ethnic groups. It is illustrated by the actions of political elites that cast members of these groups in negative ways and raised suspicions about their worthiness. These actions were consistent with a long American tradition of viewing such social problems as crime and diseases as imported along with immigrant groups (Kraut 1994).

During the 1950s, Jews were a focus for negative attention; and in the next decade it was the turn of Italians. The fervent anti-Communism that reached its apogee during the 1950s targeted groups, such as screen writers and college professors that included many Jews, and generated suspicions about their loyalty to the U.S. and its democratic, capitalist system. These suspicions seemed confirmed by the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 after their conviction for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. In the next decade, the Italians were depicted as the main source of America’s organised crime problem, an association that was solidified by a 1968 government report (Smith 1975). In both cases, not only suspicions raised about the moral suitability of the ethnics for the mainstream, but many were subject to FBI surveillance and, in the case of Jews, were blacklisted or fired.

Although the quarter century following World War II set the drivers of assimilation in motion, the social influence of key ethno-religious distinctions, while weakening, did not disappear rapidly (and in some respects still has not done so). Assimilation, in the American experience, has been a gradual, multi-generational process. As Steven Spielberg’s recent autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, reminds us, Jewish youth were often subject to anti-Semitic abuse at school (something I remember clearly from the late 1950s). And Italian Americans seeking to ascend to elite spheres, often found their way blocked by stereotypes about their intelligence or criminal connections (Alba 2006). Ill-founded rumours about mafia family ties thwarted multiple Italian-American politicians with national aspirations (for an instructive analysis of how easily these rumours could be mobilised, see Nicholas Pileggi’s [2015] account of the case of Mario Cuomo, the New York Governor who briefly considered running for President in the late 1980s). And anti-Semitism still survives in some parts of the American population (Anti-Discrimination League 2023). According to FBI data on hate crimes, Jews are still quite disproportionate among their targets (the victims of almost 8 percent of hate crimes in 2021, though they represent only about 2 percent of the population [FBI 2023]), and these crimes can take horrendously murderous forms, such as the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.

Yet, in the end, the integrative processes, including popular culture transformation, that had brought Italians and Jews to the brink of the mainstream have largely won out. Italians and Jews can be found today throughout the mainstream society, including at its highest levels. When I originally wrote this paragraph, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the second in line in Presidential succession, was Nancy Pelosi, an Italian American whose mother was an immigrant from southern Italy, and the majority leader in the Senate was Charles Schumer, who proudly identifies as Jewish. Pelosi has since been replaced by Kevin McCarthy, who comes from an Irish-Italian family background; Schumer remains in place.

Popular cultural change during the early decades of the twenty-first century

As during the middle of the last century, American popular culture is being transformed by groups that began the current century outside the mainstream. Summarising the impact of post-1965 immigrant groups, Nancy Foner (2022:, 200) observes:

There is hardly any part of American popular culture and the arts that hasn’t been influenced by immigration. Immigrants along with their children have had an impact on the foods we eat, altered the music we listen and dance to, and shaped the novels we read. Films and television programs reflect the country’s greater ethnic diversity. In cities and towns around the country, new ethnic celebrations have become part of public life … It is an age-old American pattern.

This time, however, unlike the last one, African Americans, and not just new immigrant groups, appear to be playing a major part in the changes.

We can get a better fix on the magnitude and pace of change in film and television, two highly impactful forms of popular culture, from the pioneering systematic research of UCLA’s Darnell Hunt, Ana-Christina Ramón, and their colleagues, who have been tracking the diversity in front of and behind the cameras for a decade. Their recent reports show that not-white Americans have made huge strides during the decade commencing in 2011 in their representation in all facets of movie and television production, although they are still underrepresented behind the cameras. In addition, productions with diverse casts have become predominant and earn the most money. As Hunt and Ramón (2021a) put it, ‘America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse film content.’ Apparently, white Americans do, too.

The most recent report on film (Hunt and Ramón 2022 ) is for 2021 and ‘covers the top 200 theatrical and all major streaming English-language film releases.’ It reveals the rapidly changing face of Hollywood. It shows, for example, that actors ‘of color’ (counted by Hunt and Ramón to include those with racially non-white, Latino, or mixed backgrounds) have achieved an overall representation just about matching their population total (approximately 42 percent, according to the 2020 census). They are 39 percent of film leads and 43 percent of casts. The rapidity of the increase in these proportions is little short of astounding. For a decade earlier, in 2011, the comparable figure for film leads was 11 percent – in other words, the increase in 10 years is almost fourfold. In 2011, about half of film casts were at least 90 percent white. In 2021, this fraction fell to 8 percent.

Minority representation in front of the television cameras is not quite as impressive as in film, but it has also increased rapidly in the last decade. The most recent report by Hunt and Ramón (2021b) is for the 2019–2020 season and covers 461 scripted shows televised via broadcast, cable, or digital modes. In terms of lead roles, not-white actors are furthest behind on broadcast television, where they were 23 percent in 2019–2020; however, this represents a quadrupling of their share in eight seasons, since 2011–2012. On cable, as in digital, they took a third of the lead roles in 2019–2020. This share was more than double the one they had in 2011–2012.

Overall cast diversity is high on television. For instance, a tabulation of ‘top roles’ on broadcast television reveals that 43 percent were performed by not-white actors; the figures are similar in other television formats. Again on broadcast, the share of shows whose cast was at least 40 percent minority was about a tenth in 2011–2012 but shot up to more than half in 2019–2020.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the role of not-white Americans is not so extensive behind the camera, determining what happens in front of it; but is expanding robustly, nevertheless. In the films of 2021, minorities were 30 percent of directors and 32 percent of writers, fractions that in both cases have risen steeply since 2011 (when they were 12 and 8 percent, respectively). For television in the last season of data (2019–2020), minorities were less well represented in powerful roles behind the camera. Since television has many multi-season shows, this is perhaps to be expected. For instance, the percentage of minorities who are the creators (the originators) of televisions shows is especially low, particularly on broadcast television, where some popular shows, like Law & Order, can extend decades and therefore were created years ago. This figure was just 10 percent for 2019–2020; but it was up from 4 percent in 2011–2012. Minority representation is stronger among television directors and writers, where they formed approximately a quarter of both groups across the different platforms. The published data do not make clear the change from the season eight years earlier, but it is surely substantial.

One striking aspect of the increasing representation of minorities in both the film and television industries is the importance of black Americans to this trend. This is a remarkable reversal of the assimilation pattern of the mid-twentieth century, when African Americans were excluded from the improvements experienced by formerly stigmatised white ethnics, and when African American representation in movies and television adhered to very demeaning stereotypes. This reversal is especially prominent among actors: in film lead roles (16 percent black) and overall cast representation on film and television (18 percent black in film, 15–21 percent in the three television platforms), black actors are overrepresented relative to their population proportions. The data do not distinguish between immigrant-origin (including second-generation) and African Americans, so it is not possible to say how much new immigration is contributing to this pattern. Nevertheless, the prominence in the film industry of such African Americans as Viola Davis, Ava DuVernay, Samuel Jackson, Spike Lee, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, and Denzel Washington makes clear that this new black prominence is not due only to immigration.

The most underrepresented minority is Latino, who were in 2021 for instance just 7 percent of film leads and 8 percent of film casts, less than half of what the Latino population proportion would indicate. Here, too, there is some ambiguity because of immigration. Immigrants make up a large share of Latino adults. Unlike black immigrants who often come from English-speaking countries, whether in the Caribbean or in Africa, Latino immigrants arrive speaking Spanish or sometimes indigenous tongues. Hence, many may be disadvantaged when it comes to acting in English-speaking roles. Yet the immigrant disadvantage is not sufficient to explain all of the Latino underrepresentation, as is demonstrated by the share of roles played by Asian-descent actors. They are for example 6 percent of film leads and casts, essentially identical to their population proportion, despite the fact that the majority of Asian adults in the U.S. are immigrants.

The other prominent group among not-white actors is described as ‘multiracial’ and makes up around 10 percent of casts in film and television. It’s not clear how the members of this category have been identified in these studies, nor is their precise ancestry indicated. In any event, multiracial actors are overrepresented compared to their fraction of the adult population. Given the distribution of multiracial persons across various ancestry combinations (see Alba and Maggio 2022), it seems highly plausible that a sizable number of multiracial actors would be identified by audiences as black, thus adding to the visibility of black Americans in film and on television.

This increasing diversity in creative realms of popular culture with very large audiences is impacting on the white majority. For example, of the top 10 films streamed by white audiences in 2021 (i.e., during the height of the pandemic), six had casts that were at least 30 percent minority. Moreover, there was a sizable overlap of the top films for whites with the top films for everyone else: six of these films appear also among the top 10 for black and Latino audiences and seven for Asian audiences. (Luca, Red Notice, and Raya and the Last Dragon are among the top five streamed films for every group. Two of them have casts that are at least 40 percent minority, and the percent minority for the other is between 20 and 30 percent.) On television, white households gave their highest ratings to shows with diverse casts: On broadcast television, they preferred shows that were 31–40 percent minority, and on cable, 41–50 percent minority. On broadcast, in particular, whites and minority groups most frequently watched many of the same shows, and with a couple of exceptions (e.g. Blue Bloods, about an Irish-American police family), their casts were diverse. Of the top 10 broadcast shows for white audiences, Asian households preferred seven and Latinos five. Black audiences were the exceptions, watching only three and preferring shows whose casts were at least half minority. (Diverse shows such as Chicago Fire and FBI were common to all the group lists.) The greater choice of programs on cable and digital allowed whites to watch shows with less diverse casts and the preferences of different groups to be more distinctive. Still, there were many commonalities – for example, each group featured TNT’s Snowpiercer, with a cast that was 31–40 percent minority, among its top 10 cable shows of the 2019–2020 season.

The explanation for these rapid ethno-racial shifts in the personnel of important cultural industries is undoubtedly complex and beyond my ability to state briefly. One part certainly is being played by demographic change, which is bringing about much greater diversity in the audiences for movies and television; as Hunt and Ramón observe, diverse audiences want to see more diversity on the screen. (Many whites who are sensitive to the need to open the mainstream to individuals from excluded groups want this, too.) Another part is undoubtedly due to the socioeconomic ascent of not-whites, which generates a larger pool of personnel who can staff cultural industries. Finally, a long-standing insight about outsiders is relevant: those who have been excluded have distinctive and often critical perspectives on the mainstream society that stimulate originality.

Conclusion

American mainstream culture is unmistakeably changing, expanding to accommodate much greater diversity as a result of the influences of not-white groups. The changes to popular culture appear to have accelerated in the last decade (though, granted, we have no systematic measurements before it) and are on-going, implying that still greater diversity in the popular culture lies in the future. These changes, which parallel the mid-20th cultural transformation that accompanied the social ascent of the white ethnics and their inclusion in the mainstream, seem irrevocable. Whether they will this time usher in the same degree of acceptance as the white ethnics received in the past remains to be seen. But they appear to herald a more prominent role in the mainstream society for many individuals and for cultural tropes with not-white origins.

Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the opening up of the mainstream in the twenty-first century will be as sweeping as it was in the mid-20th. For one thing, economic inequality is much higher today than it was then, and positions at the bottom of the income and wealth hierarchies, where mobility chances moreover are dim, are occupied disproportionately by black and Latino Americans (Duncan and Menestrel 2019). Thus, entry into the mainstream by minority Americans is more selective than was the assimilation of the white ethnics (though it, too, was not universal).

Some other important questions about contemporary assimilation/integration cannot be conclusively resolved at this point. One of them concerns the degree to which assimilation/integration is a matter of ‘whitening,’ of Americans with not-white family backgrounds, especially those of mixed parentage and others who have light skin tone, so that they identify some or all of the time as whites and merge socially into the white group (Zhou 2004). A common (mis)understanding of the historical assimilation of groups like the Italians and Jews is that its main result was their ultimate acceptance as whites, and parallel reasoning leads to the assumption that assimilation, if it is to occur, must reveal itself in a similar outcome today. To be sure, there almost certainly will be some whitening, promoted by the still-high status of whiteness in the U.S. One scenario involves intergenerational racial change, as many mixed individuals marry white partners (which they often do [Alba and Maggio 2022]) and have children with three white grandparents.

However, the popular-culture changes documented here indicate that twenty-first century assimilation/integration is quite unlikely to be a matter only of ‘whitening.’ A popular culture that valorises minority origins provides incentives for individuals to continue to identify with these origins when they are part of family backgrounds. This is not any different from the supposed resurgence of ethnic identity among whites in the latter part of the twentieth century. Many whites, especially those from families where memories of immigration were generationally recent, continued to identify themselves with these origins. These ‘symbolic ethnicities’ generally did not interfere with the largely non-ethnic realities of their lives (Gans 1979; Alba 1990; Waters 1990). A similar phenomenon among many integrated Americans from minority backgrounds seems on the horizon today.

Another unresolved question is the extent to which assimilation will favour immigrants and their descendants over African Americans or, more broadly stated, over the descendants of conquered or enslaved groups. Whether this historical pattern will repeat is a profoundly consequential issue for twenty-first-century assimilation given the role of blackness historically in defining the racial ‘other’ in American society (Lee and Bean 2012). Today, the drivers of status alignment and social integration are mostly affecting the children of immigrants (Alba and Maggio 2022).

There are good reasons to suspect that immigrants and their children benefit more than other marginalised groups from assimilation. One lies with the most powerful ethno-racial group, native white Americans, and the distinctions they make among other groups. Their conceptions of their families’ experiences and of the nation as an immigration society tend to accord more favourable attitudes towards immigrants and their descendants – as people who have chosen to come to the U.S. – than towards, say, African Americans as the descendants of the once enslaved. And America’s racism in its individual and systemic forms is directed most intensely at those with visible African descent.

But the evidence of the leading role of African Americans in popular cultural changes that Foner (2022) and this paper reveal appears to challenge this view. This cultural prominence is far greater than ever before, as is the degree of African-American control over group themes and representations. And whites are part of the audience. Insofar as the new African-American cultural products break with the stereotypes of the past and present more fully the humanity of black Americans, we can expect them to increase their acceptance by the mainstream’s dominant group, whites. Moreover, the growing immigrant share among black Americans, and their second-generation success (Abramitzky and Boustan 2022), will also contribute to a black presence in the mainstream.

This reasoning implies that the question about the degree to which African Americans can ultimately participate in assimilation, along with immigrants and their progeny – a question that for a long time has haunted the literature on assimilation (Alba and Nee 2003) – should be regarded as unresolved for the time being.

In conclusion, this examination of changes to American popular culture at a time when numerous individuals with minority backgrounds are experiencing socioeconomic mobility and/or social integration underscores the ‘realism’ of assimilation/integration theories. In short, assimilation/integration is happening, even if not for everyone. It seems important to point this out at the moment because of the challenges to these ideas strongly pushed by scholars operating from critical perspectives (Treitler 2015; Schinkel 2019). Critical theories start from a profound critique (and rejection) of the contemporary social order and envision a radical change to a different one, in which central features of the present have been overturned (e.g. the end of white supremacy). By comparison, the social-science realism that underpins assimilation/integration theories has as its goal a thorough understanding of the ways that existing societies ‘work’ and of the operation and consequences of their actual social arrangements such as institutions. This goal is in turn justified by the belief that improvements in the social world, such as reductions in inequality, are most likely to come from this kind of understanding.

To ignore or downplay the changes associated with assimilation risks failing to understand how the contemporary social and political landscape and the constraints and opportunities it poses for progressive change are being reshaped. Indeed, the contemporary political realignments in the U.S., such as the increasing support by Latino voters for conservatives (Gest 2022), a reflection of their growing assimilation, is a compelling illustration. To rephrase Santayana’s famous warning, those who fail to understand the present may be condemned to repeat the past.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since mixed-race Americans are contributing to population diversity, it does not make sense to count them as ‘white’ when measuring changes at the top of the work force, even though they may identify at least sometimes as ‘white’ (Alba 2020).