Becoming white or becoming mainstream?: defining the endpoint of assimilation

ABSTRACT

In this article we address some of the controversies that have arisen in the reception of Richard Alba’s work on changing patterns of ethnoracial diversity and the integration of immigrants. We parse some of the debates around the term ‘assimilation’, arguing that it is still a useful term for understanding the trajectories of immigrants and their descendants. We argue that Alba’s demographic analyses of the incorporation of post 1965 immigrants is an objective description of statistical changes in the population, but it is sometimes critiqued by scholars who point to subjective experiences of discrimination and prejudice among this population. We argue that this is best explained by the ‘integration paradox’ – greater integration leads to more, not less, feelings of exclusion, especially at the beginning of the process. We explore what Alba means when he discusses the expansion of the white racial category, and we review research on whiteness to bring attention to the question of whether the expansion of the mainstream and the blurring of the boundaries of whiteness are related. We stress the importance of differentiating between whiteness as a category, an identity, and an ideology.

KEYWORDS:

• Assimilation
• race
• whiteness
• integration
• mainstream

Richard Alba’s scholarly work has contributed greatly to both our theoretical understanding and empirical documentation of the incorporation of immigrants and their children into American society. His early writing documented the integration of later generation European origin Americans. His later work turned to future prospects for Americans of Latin American, Asian and African origins. In both streams of research, he has addressed the question of race – how the color line between whites and other groups – changes as long-term integration progresses.

Not surprisingly, such prominent research has attracted some disagreement from other scholars. In this article we highlight some of Alba’s most important contributions to the field and we address some of the criticisms of his work. First, we parse some of the debates around the term ‘assimilation’, arguing that it is still a useful term for understanding the trajectories of immigrants and their descendants. Second, we argue that Alba’s demographic analyses of the incorporation of post 1965 immigrants is an objective description of statistical changes in the population. But it is sometimes critiqued by scholars who point to subjective experiences of discrimination and prejudice among this population. This subjective feeling of exclusion is evidence, they think that post 1965 immigrants are not being integrated into the mainstream. We argue that this is best explained through what Schaeffer and Kas (2023) have called the ‘integration paradox’ – greater integration leads to more, not less feelings of exclusion, especially at the beginning of the process. Finally, we address the question of what Alba means when he discusses the expansion of the white racial category, and we review recent research on whiteness to bring some clarity to the question of whether the expansion of the mainstream and the blurring of the boundaries of whiteness are related. We stress the importance of differentiating between whiteness as a category, an identity, and an ideology. We end by outlining some of the ways Alba’s research points to important new directions in social science research on these topics.

Assimilation

Much of Alba’s work has centered on the notion of assimilation. This is, of course, a term that has often been controversial in the United States and even more so in Europe (Bashi Treitler 2013; Favell 2022). Part of the issue is that the term is used as both a description and prescription; an empirical account of what is (or is not) happening in migrant receiving societies and a political statement about what some believe should happen. In its most extreme version, policies of ‘forced assimilation’ have amounted to cultural erasure, particularly in the case of indigenous populations in settler colonial societies. Even in less extreme cases, prescriptive advocates of assimilation have argued that immigrants and other minorities will experience better outcomes when they come to share the cultural and behavioral norms of the host society. Indeed, in the early twentieth century even many progressives advocated that immigrants changed their names to sound more ‘American’ and ceased speaking their parent’s languages (Foner 2000). Many, although by no means all, of the immigrants did just that. As the Italian American educator Leonard Covello famously recalled, ‘We were becoming Americans by learning to be ashamed of our parents’ (Irorizzo and Mondello 1980, 118). Not surprisingly, in the wake of the social movements of the 1960s this view generally fell out of favor.

In Rethinking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (2003). Alba and Victor Nee explicitly reject this prescriptive use of the term as well as the assumption of the superiority of the ‘mainstream’ culture. They do however insist that, as a simple empirical description of American life, a very high degree of assimilation did in fact happen to the descendants of many once excluded groups, vestigial expressions of ‘symbolic ethnicity’ notwithstanding (Gans 1979; Waters 1990; Kasinitz 2014). They also specify the conditions that give rise to assimilation, and they define the ‘mainstream’ as the target of assimilation – the conditions of acceptance and integration in which ethnic and religious origins no longer determine destinies. In contrast to earlier versions of ‘assimilation’ that focused largely on how the immigrants and their children changed over time, Alba and Nee emphasized the structural and institutional context and the historical conditions under which these changes take place. These conditions include changes in demography, opportunities for non-zero-sum mobility and changing legal and institutional rules and preferences. Thus, Alba and Nee argue that the American ‘mainstream’ was able to expand to include Catholics and Jews, not only because over time the newcomers had begun to resemble white Protestants – although that did happen to some degree – but also because demographic, political and institutional changes allowed for an acceptance of diverse newcomers that would have been unimaginable in earlier times. They also strongly imply that there is no reason to assume this cannot happen with many of today’s newcomers, non-European origins notwithstanding.

Finally, Alba and Nee argue that while many newcomers and their descendants have come to share much of the cultural and behavioral ways of ‘mainstream’ society, that the mainstream has itself expanded. Thus some, but not all, differences that would have been seen as exotic or even shocking in earlier times came to be accepted and even valued as part of North American life. For example, one recent analysis of twentieth century popular literature shows a steady movement from depictions of migrant groups from ‘strange’ to ‘normal’ in mainstream publications (Voyer et al. 2022). Interestingly, this pattern holds for both groups now regarded as ‘white’ (Italians, Irish, Jews) and those now often seen as racially ‘non-white’ (Chinese, Mexicans). Using very different methods, Tomas Jimenez’s community study The Other Side of Assimilation makes a similar case for the expansion of the ‘mainstream’ to embrace some, but not all, formerly excluded outsiders (Jimenez 2017; see also Voyer 2013). Under such circumstances newcomers may be ‘assimilating’ into a society that is already diverse, as Crul and Lelie (2023) have argued is now happening in some European cities.

Another popular way of thinking about assimilation in the U.S. is the blurring and or shifting of boundaries of ‘whiteness’. White ethnics such as Italians and the Irish who had been seen as unassimilable and ‘not quite white’ were, after several generations, seen as not much different than other European origin groups. In Noel Ignatiev’s words, the Irish ‘became white’ (2009). Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (2003) explored how Italian Americans came to be seen as white. Karen Brodkin (1998) explored ‘how Jews became white folks’ in the US (but not as Wilkerson reminds us, in pre-war Germany), arguing that American racial boundaries are subject to constant change even if the binary of black and white is not (Wilkerson 2020). Indeed, the historical ‘whiteness’ literature is premised on the idea that racial boundaries are shifting and permeable. Looking at the experience of more recent and more clearly ‘non-white’ immigrants, Bonilla-Silva uses the notion of ‘honorary whites,’ which allows him to argue for a racial division between included and excluded groups, while at the same time, recognizing the shifting and historically contingent nature of some, although not all, racial boundaries (Bonilla-Silva 2014).

Alba has made only limited use of the concept of ‘whiteness’ and the ‘whiteness historians’ have often been reluctant to use the term ‘assimilation’ given its political baggage. Yet the ‘whiteness’ argument does have a considerable amount in common with Alba and Nee’s ‘neo-assimilation theory’ in that both emphasize the importance of the changing historical and political context. At the same time, we should be cautious about using the concept of ‘becoming white’ too literally. Some European immigrants were indeed subject to a great deal of social discrimination and institutional exclusion. As Alba notes, in many cases this went on for longer than is sometimes remembered. In extreme cases marginalized European groups were compared to African Americans (the use of the derogatory term ‘guinea’ for Italians may have origins in this comparison). But white immigrants were never subject to chattel slavery or anything like Jim Crow segregation. Unlike Asians, they were never barred from naturalization. They were able to vote and participate politically shortly after arrival. If they were seen as ‘not quite white’ they were certainly not Black (Guglielmo and Salerno 2003).¹ The broad expansion of the American ‘mainstream’ in the post war era was limited by a racial ‘bright boundary’ (see Alba 2009) when it came to African Americans. This is not because African Americans were more inherently ‘different’ from the mainstream than newcomers of European origin, but rather that the white majority remained ideologically, politically, and economically committed to white supremacy and was unwilling to accept African Americans as equal members of society. Indeed, this point was forcefully made during the Jim Crown era by the African American Sociologist E. Franklyn Frazier, who argued that the extraordinary efforts of the African American middle class to emulate ‘proper’ ‘white society’ were doomed to failure given the lack of white acceptance and as such could, at best, produce an ‘escape into delusions’ (Frazier 1957, 188).

In a highly critical essay on the notion of assimilation, Jung (2009:, 384) notes that while ‘assimilation theory used to squeeze African Americans into the scope of analysis, it now squeezes them out.’ Yet, this we argue, is precisely the point. Native born African Americans are not immigrants. They have historically occupied a different and unique legal and structural status in American society. Indeed, as Jung notes, Alba and Nee pointedly argue that the institutional mechanisms of integration and the decline in the public acceptability of blatant racism that have allowed the incorporation of non-white immigrants, were largely brought about through the African American led civil rights movement. Yet native African Americans have, arguably, benefited less from these changes than other ‘outsider’ groups. In post-civil rights America those groups who entered U.S. Society through enslavement and conquest continue to face a very different situation than those who entered through immigration – high levels of discrimination and historic exclusion notwithstanding. However, contrary to some of the more expansive versions of critical race theory, this distinction does not really turn on ‘whiteness vs. non whiteness’. ² The ‘mainstream’ in the Alba Nee version of assimilation is not ‘whiteness’ per se (nor is it a signifier of European origin) – but rather the result of the expanding core institutions of society – education and the workplace and social organizations and their inclusion of people who define themselves as nonwhite. Alba and Nee argue explicitly that one does not have to conform to a white Protestant Anglo model of being an American to be fully accepted in twenty-first Century America.

In Alba and Nee’s new mainstream ethnicity and birthplace do not determine life chances. In the early twentieth century even many progressives advocated that immigrants change their names to ‘fit in’ in American society. Such advice would be unimaginable today. There is undoubtably something slightly utopian about this. For those of us persuaded by this vision in the giddy ‘post racial’ days of the Obama administration, four years of Donald Trump were sobering indeed. Yet Alba’s corpus of work demonstrates that the mainstream in the U.S. has become much more open to many although not all types of racial and ethnic diversity and this has been accompanied by a great deal of intergenerational social mobility, even while racial and ethnic discrimination continue to characterize many aspects of American society. This theory of assimilation and of the permeability of the mainstream is nuanced – it shows great progress over time, all the while recognizing the many impediments to full inclusion that many immigrants and native minorities continue to face.

In The Great Demographic Illusion Alba (2020) has built on his theory of assimilation through his demographic work on the blurring of the color line in the United States in the twenty-first Century. He presents several different but interrelated arguments. First, and at the most basic level, he criticizes population projections that assume that ethno-racial identities remain fixed despite high levels of intermarriage among the major ethnoracial groups in the U.S., many of whom, although certainly not all, are now the grown children and grandchildren of immigrants who arrived since 1965. He further argues that with the growth of access into mainstream institutions the meaning of the boundaries separating these groups have strong potential to change as the boundaries blur, not only for the rapidly growing population of mixed race people but also for other upwardly mobile members of groups, such as Asian and Latinx Americans who were historically excluded from many aspects of American life.

As such, The Great Demographic Illusion, challenges both the accuracy and the significance of the idea of a coming ‘non-white majority.’ He chronicles the increased inter-marriage between whites and Asians and Latinos and finds that their mixed race offspring are generally more similar to whites in terms of their socioeconomic status than they are like their single origin Latino or Asian age compatriots. As such they ‘tilt white’ – exactly the opposite of how the U.S. census bureau and other sources of official statistics generally categorize them. In so doing these agencies have, in effect, extended the infamous ‘one drop rule’ – historically used almost exclusively in regard to African Americans – to other ‘nonwhite’ groups, despite the fact that there is little evidence that this actually reflects the lived experience of today’s mixed race population. By applying ‘hypodescent’ notions of racial identity which originated in chattel slavery and Jim Crow (Haney Lopez and Ian 1996; Hollinger 2003) to mixed race Asian and Latinx Americans, most of whom are descended from post 1965 immigrants, these statistics are generalizing from the most extreme case.³

Alba argues that this leads to a lack of understanding of long-range assimilation processes. The result has been a perception of ‘demographic threat’ which undermines the process of boundary reduction because it instills fear among those whites who saw themselves as a majority and now see themselves becoming a minority. Indeed, Alba initially saw this book as, in part, a refutation of the anti-immigrant ‘great replacement theory’ – the argument that there is a global plan orchestrated by elites (often portrayed as Jews) to replace Christian whites with non-white, non-Christian people (Idris Miller 2020). Once regarded as the farfetched ideas of fringe white supremacists, these notions have gained traction on the American right and within the Republican party, as well as among right wing populist movements in Europe. However, perhaps to his surprise, Alba’s work has also drawn criticism from many on the left for whom the vision of a coming non-white majority remains deeply attractive.

The integration paradox

Among the more pointed critiques of Alba’s recent work is Cristina Mora and Rodríguez-Muñiz’s article ‘Latinos, Race, and the American Future’ (2017). Following Benedict Anderson (1991), Mora and Rodríguez-Muñiz begin with a reminder that the U.S. census, like all censuses and official statistics, is a political product, defining populations in ways that reflect political interests. The boxes an individual checks when confronted with a limited number of identity choices not of their own choosing may bear only a tenuous relationship to their subjective understanding of their racial or ethnic identity. This is an important reminder to demographers and other social scientists who too often use these data with little attention to what these categories mean in people’s everyday lives. Mora and Rodríguez-Muñiz are right to assert that demographic projections must be ‘handled with care’ (46). However, it seems particularly unfair to level this critique at Alba. One of his main points is that the decision to extend the ‘one drop rule’ to groups such as Asians and Hispanics, thus reducing the number of whites in the population, was, in fact a political decision with political consequences. Indeed, his critique of the idea of a coming non-white majority points to exactly the sort of naive use of statistics detached from lived reality that Mora and Rodríguez-Muñiz caution us about, albeit with perhaps very different political conclusions. More revealing, however, is Mora and Rodríguez-Muñiz’s point that the fact that census numbers show many Latinx Americans, particularly those of mixed heritage, are living lives increasingly like those of whites does not necessarily mean they feel like or are treated like whites. Indeed, studies that measure how people understand their ethnoracial identity often lead to conclusions quite different than those which measure convergence among ethnoracial groups on factors such as educational attainment, income or residential integration.

Lee and Sheng (2024) take this argument further. Focusing on Asian Americans they argue that while this group has experienced very rapid upward mobility in terms of educational attainment and income, there are both historical reasons and contemporary circumstances that lead them to continue to perceive themselves as vulnerable ‘outsiders.’ They thus question the actual degree of Asian American assimilation, regardless of the statistical evidence Alba and others point to. Therefore, they recommend moving away from assessing assimilation in terms of ‘normative’ measures and suggest that we should focus instead (or perhaps in addition) on the way ‘ethnoracial minorities experience assimilation and identity.’ They advocate a ‘subject centered’ approach which ‘privileges the experiences, perceptions of belonging, and group position of the populations we study’ (Lee and Sheng 2024, 12).

This disjuncture between objective and subjective experiences of assimilation is perhaps less surprising or paradoxical than it might appear at first. In many ways it reflects what in Europe has come to be called the ‘Integration Paradox.’ In their exhaustive analysis of quantitative studies Schaeffer and Kas (2023, 1) show that it is indeed quite common for the greater integration of newcomer groups into mainstream social institutions to be accompanied by heightened perceptions of marginality and outsider status. As they note, ‘factors like better education, which appear to signal improved integration into mainstream society, may also lead to greater exposure to mainstream members (and) heightened familiarity with exclusionary public discourse’. Or to put it crudely, integration into mainstream or even elite institutions, social circles and neighborhoods involves greater exposure to the racial majority. This in turn means that minority members have the ‘opportunity’ (if that is the right word) to experience prejudice and racism in settings that in previous generations they would have had little access to. Even if they do not experience outright prejudice, when members of previously excluded groups achieve admission to high status mainstream institutions the experience of being constantly in the minority almost certainly raises awareness of one’s ‘outsider’ status, in ways perhaps not as omnipresent as it is for their less assimilated co-ethnics and forebears.

Using very different methods, Elijah Anderson’s ethnographic work (2011; 2015) documents this situation for upwardly mobile African Americans. Since integration almost never means that whites are entering previously Black dominated institutions or social or physical spaces, it is almost always Blacks – particularly upwardly mobile Blacks, who bear the psychic costs of integration. They are in historically ‘white spaces’ in which they are constantly aware of their minority status and in which the legitimacy of their presence can be (and often is) called into question at any time. Anderson, it should be noted, does not question the reality or value of integration. He does not subscribe to the ‘nothing really changes’ notion one sees in some critical race theory. While his informants occasionally express nostalgia for a pre-integration world, they have no real interest in a return to the Jim Crow era. But, as Anderson reminds us, integration has costs and among these can be a hyper awareness of outsider status among the most objectively integrated members of the group.

In some cases this hyper awareness may be just a temporal lag. Resentment of new groups may decrease over time. Pioneering members of new groups certainly face more resistance than those who follow as their numbers increase. In other cases – such as those Anderson studies – deeply rooted biases are likely to remain or even increase with integration, particularly when dominant groups feel threatened with displacement. Historical circumstances can also increase resentment of objectively well integrated upwardly mobile groups (Bozorgmehr and Ketcham 2018). Yet it is important to remember that in many cases resentments and conflicts are not the result of a lack of assimilation. Indeed, they may reflect the opposite.

Social scientists should be aware that we have seen this before. After the publication of William Julius Wilson’s provocatively titled The Declining Significance of Race (1978), a host of studies, books and articles appeared calling attention to race’s continuing and perhaps even inclining significance (Feagin 1991). Yet it soon became clear that Wilson and his critics were talking past each other. While Wilson and his supporters pointed to changes in employment and income among a large subgroup of African Americans, their critics focused on continuing interpersonal discrimination in public places, social settings as well as from the police, despite considerable integration. In later years Wilson would note that he himself had experienced this sort of discrimination. Yet this did not mean that substantial integration had not occurred (Wilson 2009).

We should be clear that in pointing to the ironies of the ‘integration paradox’ we are not suggesting that subjective experiences of exclusion and marginality are not important. However, we do want to stress that awareness of exclusion and difference so evident in a ‘subject centered’ approach in no way disproves the types of structural assimilation that Alba and others have written about. Indeed, such awareness may even be the result of assimilation.

Being white in the twenty-first century

Alba’s attention to the changing patterns of racial identification and intermixing suggest to some critics that Alba is accepting ‘whiteness’ as a goal or endpoint of integration, despite the fact that in their theory of neo-assimilation Alba and Nee are clear that it is entrance into the mainstream, and not whiteness per se, that defines assimilation. This may be because Alba writes about the expansion of the category ‘white’ to encompass white ethnics such as Italians and Irish in the twentieth Century and about the expansion of the category ‘white’ as the offspring of intermarried Asian-white and Hispanic-white parents often ‘lose’ their non-white identities. He uses similarity to whites in measurable characteristics such as education and occupation to argue that many mixed race individuals ‘tilt white’. Thus, Alba’s work points to both a historical and contemporary blurring of the boundaries surrounding the white racial category. This does not mean that the category ‘white’ and the mainstream are the same thing, or that Alba is arguing that the endpoint of assimilation is whiteness although his work does suggest that the blurring of racial boundaries is part of the process of assimilation, both historically and in the contemporary period.

In their critique of Alba’s argument that census bureau projections of a white minority are inaccurate Mora and Rodriguez Munoz (2017, 3) argue that the term ‘white’ can be used in two different ways. They argue that Alba and the Census use it as just another variable or category. It is ‘a self selected category with various correlated attributes … Whiteness, in other words, is a statistical artifact that distinguishes a certain population from others.’ They contrast this with the way race scholars use the term, where ‘white’ is about privilege and hierarchy. They add: “Moreover, it is about a hierarchy that attaches narratives about moral worth and legitimacy to images of whiteness” (page 3). This means that social mobility and mixed ethnic ancestry will not necessarily lead to white boundary blurring. Whites, they seem to infer, would not allow the blurring of a boundary that encases privilege. They argue that the idea that ‘on the whole they are becoming white underestimates the ongoing racial stigmatization and exclusion faced by many in this community’ (page 4). Alba answers this critique by pointing out that he never said all Latinos were being incorporated into the white dominated mainstream, just that the identity choices and the characteristics suggest that some people with mixed ancestry backgrounds are being absorbed into the white category. This process, he argues is similar to what happened when a previous white Protestant mainstream absorbed Catholics and Jews. To be sure, late 19th and twentieth Century Protestant were also interested in guarding a boundary that encased privilege. Yet, as the literature on ‘whiteness’ and ‘becoming white’ shows, racial boundaries were permeable at least under some circumstances. Why this should be clearly true for early twentieth century Italians (to pick one example) but utterly unimaginable for twenty-first century Latinxs or Asians, is never made clear. (Interestingly Bonilla-Silva splits the difference here by suggesting that some ‘non-white’ groups might become ‘honorary whites’ (Bonilla-Silva 2014) with upward mobility and changing structural circumstances).

How important is ‘whiteness’ to people inside the category? Historically, a strong and self conscious white identity has been more important in the south than the rest of the US. Pride in white identity was associated with Confederate flags, and monuments to the lost cause and were part of a self-consciously constructed white identity steeped in white supremacism. As Du Bois notes, ‘Whiteness’ in the Jim Crow South was a position of social status, honor and entitlement to rights accorded even the poorest whites and denied virtually all Blacks (Du Bois 1935). At times this ‘southern’ version of whiteness has had cultural content as well, as seen in assertions of a ‘southern way of life’. At various points in the twentieth Century the symbols of this identity spread throughout the country, given new energy with the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and growing resentment of nonwhites. Yet for many white Americans whiteness has been an empty signifier. In terms of identity, ethnicity was much more salient, along with regional identities – New Englanders, Appalachians, Westerners, New Yorkers, Angelenos, Texans. Those identities had content. ‘White’ was often a residual category implying a lack of difference. For many, it simply meant ‘normal’.

When Alba (1990) and Mary Waters (1990) examined later generation white ethnics in New York, California, and Pennsylvania in the late 1980s they found that Italian and other white European ethnics kept their identities, but this had little impact on their lives – intermarriage was high and many whites in the 3rd generation had multiple ancestries. This matched what Herbert Gans (1979) had theorized as ‘symbolic ethnicities’. What neither Alba nor Waters found were people who identified strongly as ‘whites’. If Alba or Waters had asked about whiteness as an identity, they probably would have found what the whiteness literature describes as ‘invisible whiteness’, people who do not see or claim that their white racial identity influences their lives very much.

The theoretical work on whiteness that developed after these studies identified whiteness as something that was ‘unmarked’; that provided benefits and privileges for whites but was not recognized by those who were white. This literature elaborated on WEB Du Bois’s insight (often without attribution) that whiteness was taken for granted as the ‘norm’, and rarely recognized by those who profited from its ‘wages.’ Whiteness, in this sense, is a political position, not a cultural or ethnic identity. Thus, in most of the United States, one rarely hears any discussion of ‘white literature,’ ‘white music’ or ‘white cuisine’ (at least until recently). Of course, the late 1960s saw assertions of ‘white power’ and ‘white pride’ – paradoxically closely modeled on the assertions of ‘Black Power’ and ‘Black Pride’. Yet, at least until the Trump administration, these were largely limited to reactionary anti-civil rights forces, mostly in the south, and to the extreme margins of the far right and neo-fascist groups. If anything, whiteness has been less a racial identity that one might take pride in, than the absence of racial distinctiveness. For much of U.S. history one of the clearest forms of ‘white privilege’ has been the privilege not to have to think about race. Thus, whiteness has been an important marker of membership. Yet it is oddly contentless – an empty signifier.

Recently, many discussions of the ways in which whites profit from structural racism that puts them at the top of the racial hierarchy have come to imply that in order to overcome that racism, whites had to stop taking their racial identity for granted. Whites, it is argued, need to stop claiming that they were ‘color blind’ (Frankenberg 2001) Lipsitz (1998:, 1)., for example, describes whiteness as a social condition that ‘never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.’ From this perspective, the first step in dismantling racism is for whites to recognize their racial identities. In psychology this is best illustrated through the work of Janet Helms (1990) who developed a scale to measure white racial identity and a model of white racial identity development. She developed a series of stages that whites pass through in the development of their identity, with the final stage being a rejection of racism and development of a ‘non-racist core’. Psychologists Goren and Plaut (2012) label this type of white identity as a ‘power cognizant’ form.

Empirical and theoretical work on whiteness has flowered since these early works, and it is clear that there is variation in how much whites recognize or identify with their race. Sociologist Ron Eyerman (2022) describes three different meanings of whiteness: as an administrative category – checking a box on a census form; as an identity – a self identification as a group different than non white groups; and as a self conscious mobilized group identity – with identity based subcultures, virtual, imagined and real. Political scientist Ashley Jardina (2019) also describes three types of whites using different terminology to describe a typology of the salience and content of race – people with a white identity; people with a white consciousness, also defined as mobilized white identity, and white supremacists – people with a white consciousness and high racial resentment towards non-whites.

Statistical estimates of the prevalence and correlates of these different types of whiteness have emerged in the last two decades. There are two sources of nationally representative survey data on the salience and nature of white racial identity – the American Mosaic study, a nationally representative study of ethnic and racial identity, conducted in 2003; and new questions on whiteness added to the American National Election Survey (ANES) in 2012 and a question on consciousness of white identity added to the ANES Pilot in 2016.

Hartmann, Gerteis, and Croll (2009) use American Mosaic data to test some of the predictions of theoretical writing on whiteness – that whiteness is latent and unrecognized, that white Americans are unaware of the structural benefits of whiteness (white privilege) and that whites do not see how the disadvantages of non-whites are tied to their own advantages. They also asked those who identified as white about the salience of their racial identity – they asked how important their racial identity was to them and whether they wanted to preserve their racial culture. Not surprisingly, they find a weak racial identity for whites compared to nonwhites. Among whites, only 37% of respondents said their racial identity was very important to them, compared to 72% of nonwhites. More whites said their racial identity was somewhat important (37%). A large majority (74%) of whites said that they wanted to preserve their ‘racial culture’. However, the survey did not ask about the content of that racial culture. Region (living in the South) and education (less than a college education) were the strongest predictors of having a strong racial identity as white. The authors conclude that the responses of whites do not match many of the predictions of the more theoretical writing on whiteness. They do not dismiss this writing based on their findings, but rather point to the difficulty of measuring what whiteness means.

In a follow up survey (the American Mosaic Boundaries survey), Croll and Gerteis (2019) examine the relative saliency of specific white ethnicities vs white racial identity – addressing the question of what the white ethnics studied by Alba (1990) and Waters (1990) almost thirty years earlier might say today. In an open ended survey, they asked respondents their race, and then a follow up question, ‘Is there another ethnic category that you more closely identify with than [race]?’ They found that only 14% of whites said there was an ethnic category they more closely identified with. This is similar to Gallagher’s (2003:, 147) finding that only 13 percent of whites ‘indicated that their ethnicity was a salient and important part of their identity.’ These studies suggest that the white ethnics who claimed a symbolic ethnicity in the 1980s may now have dropped the ethnic part of their identity in favor of just a racial identity. But what is the content and strength of this identity?

Jardina (2019) uses the ANES data to measure the centrality of white identity (How important is being white to your identity?); whether whites feel positively or negatively towards their group (To what extent do you feel that white people in this country have a lot to be proud of?) and the degree to which whites feel close to other whites (How much would you say that whites in this country have a lot in common with each other?). She also measures what she describes as white consciousness with two items: “How likely is it that whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead?” and “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?”. She finds that 30-40% of white Americans have a white racial identity, reporting that their white racial identity is very or extremely important to them. This is low compared to blacks, 69–85% of whom report that their racial identity is very or extremely important to them and Hispanics, with 49–75% reporting a strong identity. ⁴ Jardina estimates that 26% of whites have high racial consciousness, and about 38% have very low consciousness. She stresses that racial identity and consciousness do not correlate strongly with racial animus towards non-whites. Whites who have strong identities and consciousness are characterized by strong in group positive feelings but are no more likely than others to have strong negative feelings towards nonwhites. A small proportion – 3% of whites combine strong identity, strong consciousness and racial resentment towards nonwhites, a group Jardina calls white supremacists. All of these percentages of course are based on people who self categorize as white. So another way to look at Jardina’s findings are that 60-70% of those who report that they are white do not have either a white racial identity or consciousness – they are the whites for whom being white is not that important and who do not see whites being discriminated against in favor of minorities.

Many scholars have suggested that the immigration driven growth of the non-white population in the past 50 years; together with the election of Barack Obama, has led to what Herbert Blumer described as group status threat (see also Bobo 1983; Bobo and Hutchings 1986). It does seem that since the election of Barack Obama and the rise of Donald Trump that white supremacist ideology, pushed to the margins of American political discourse since the late 1960s has come back into the open. The marchers in Charlottesville Virginia in the summer of 2017 openly chanted antisemitic and racist slogans; while carrying torches and confederate flags. In this sense, a white identity is a reactive identity, tied to growing diversity and declining majority status (Abascal 2020; Craig and Richeson 2014; Enos 2017). Another theoretical perspective – social dominance theory suggests that not only the numerical growth of non-whites, but the increases in racial equality between whites and non whites would be seen as threatening to whites (Sidanius and Pratto 1999).

While overt white supremacy never went away, many Americans were shocked by how openly and forcefully this ideology was presented, and of course even more shocked when the President of the US said there were ‘good people on both sides’ of the issue. The visibility and seeming acceptance of white supremacist ideology that Charlottesville and Trump represent begs the question of whether whiteness has new meaning in our society. Yet there is conflicting empirical evidence for these theories. The evidence shows that strong white racial identities actually declined during the Trump presidency, including among white Republicans, (Jardina, Kalmoe, and Gross 2021) and has not increased since these identities were first measured in 2006 (Fording and Schram 2023). The effect of residential diversity also does not seem directly tied to rising white identity or consciousness. Rather, residential diversity interacts with attitudes about racial diversity. Using American Mosaic data, Croll (2007:, 634) finds that ‘Whites who value diversity and live in diverse areas are less likely to feel their white racial identity is very important.’

The finding that most whites are categorically white, but do not have a strong identity or consciousness as white is consistent with studies of the instability of answers to the census race question among mixed race Americans and Hispanics. If race is merely a category that you check on a form and not something you think about a lot, it makes sense that you might give different answers at different times to the same race questions. As Alba and Islam (2009) found in the case of the ‘missing Mexicans’, and as Alba points out in his most recent book, many Hispanics go back and forth between saying they are white and ‘Some other race’ (Liebler et al. 2017). Sixty five percent of Hispanics identify as white on the American Community Survey (Filindra and Kolbe 2022). Virtually the same percentage, 66%, identified as white on the 2012 ANES. Only 18% of all Latinos said that their identity as white was ‘extremely important to them.’ As in the other studies of white identity by political scientists, self categorization as white does not have an effect on voting and political attitudes, but a strong racial identity as white is correlated with being a Republican and expressing conservative views (Filindra and Kolbe 2022, 1439).

Ironically then, policing the boundary of whiteness by denying that ‘whites’ can contain new ethnic groups such as Hispanics or the descendants of interracial marriages is coming from both the left and the right. White supremacists and their Fox news acolytes see whiteness as a real and endangered identity, a majority in danger of becoming a minority, and an identity with a real content. Right wing white supremacists are invested in the idea of a ‘pure’ white race and are opposed to intermarriage. Scholars on the left also see whiteness as a real identity and exhort white people to own the identity by recognizing their white privilege and therefore working to become anti racist (DiAngelo and Dyson 2018; Kendi 2019). Critical race scholars argue that white is a power category that defines itself as opposed to nonwhites, and is about privilege and hierarchy. Whites, in this argument, would not allow the boundary to be blurred. But both of these perspectives are giving more credence to a white racial identity than most whites are.

Exhorting whites to develop a strong racial identity risks accepting and perhaps reifying an idea about racial identity which originates on the far right, and carries with it many right wing and neo-fascist assumptions about the reality of socially constructed racial categories. Whites interrogating their own racism is at best a distraction and at worse pure narcissism, which, ironically, places whites, once again, in the center of discussions about race. By putting whites and white attitudes in the middle it can be a form of virtue signaling. Race is a structural position. It is not about individual prejudice. Which is why an individual looking into the racism in their soul and renouncing it does not get us anywhere.

Alba has two main findings about ethnoracial change in recent decades – the mainstream is expanding to include many upwardly mobile African Americans and post 1965 immigrants and their descendants. And, he finds that the category white has expanded in the past to include white ethnic groups that had been excluded and derided and the white category on the census is increasingly chosen by many Hispanics and by a significant proportion of the offspring of intermarried couples. Clearly, if intermarriage stays high or grows then the white category could expand even further, slowing the ‘majority minority’ scenario that has fueled right wing politics and been shown to prompt fear and conservative politics among whites who read about it.

But the relationship between these two concepts – whiteness and the mainstream remains somewhat confusing. Alba and Nee (2003) were very careful to make clear that the mainstream is not equal to being white and becoming white is not a prerequisite for joining the mainstream. But then why is the expansion of whiteness an important part of the past of assimilation and seemingly an indicator of assimilation for today’s immigrants? We have argued above that in his demographic work Alba uses the white category as a measure of identity and assimilation because it is what the census asks about. And this has led to some controversy as scholars push back that many current immigrants and their children will never be ‘white’. In this back and forth we have pointed out that the boundaries of who can be white are policed by both the right and the left, both of whom, for very different reasons think whites should have a recognized strong identity. Yet our reading of recent empirical research on whiteness leads us to conclude that most whites are neither embracing white supremacism or white privilege. Most whites see whiteness as a rather empty category. We think this might be a good thing. Identities are encased in strong boundaries, categories can shift more easily. Tajfel ‘s (1970) minimal group experiments should give pause to those who exhort whites to embrace their identity in order to deny their privilege. Embracing a group leads to in-group favoritism and out-group exclusion.

So, our reading of the empirical findings on whiteness point to the potential for white boundaries to blur, given that most whites and Hispanics who choose white on a census are not seeing it as an identity that needs not necessarily be defended, but rather as a category without much importance or content. But we still do not know whether the fact that some Latinos and Asians with mixed ancestry move into the white category portends large-scale ethnic assimilation in which boundaries are blurring overall or if the boundary blurring is significantly limited by racialization, and that the ‘racial passing’ of Latino-white and Asian-white children will do little to alter the Asian-white and Latino-white boundary itself. And we do not know how that blurring or expansion actually affects what it means to be white or how whiteness operates in our racial structure. Does boundary blurring to include (some) Latinos and Asians mean that whiteness loses its power in shaping social stratification or does it really just reinforce current racial boundaries while moving relatively more people into the white column?

If the endpoint of assimilation for white ethnics is whiteness, and if that holds for some Hispanics and some mixed race offspring of intermarried Asians and Hispanics, does that put further pressure on people to be white to enter the mainstream? Or does the expansion of the mainstream make whiteness less important overall and reduce the salience of the identity of white and the boundaries surrounding it?

We do not know the answer because the expansion of whiteness is not evidence of what is happening in the mainstream, and could mean very different things in the future. It could mean that some upwardly mobile people become ‘white’, and the boundary with non whites still stays strong, or it could mean that race becomes less important going forward as the mainstream becomes more and more diverse and the meaning of racial boundaries also change. This may be the crux of the argument between Alba and his critics. Both the mainstream and whiteness are expanding and some of the same people are living that expansion. Alba is cautiously optimistic that this could lead to a society less concerned with race and more truly inclusive across racial boundaries that have existed for centuries. Other scholars, particularly those operating from a critical race perspective that sees race as a permanent feature that finds new ways to separate and oppress regardless of seeming progress, think this optimism is misguided. As we pointed out above, the subjective experience of life in the mainstream may actually temporarily increase pessimism for some people of color, ironically because of the processes of assimilation. The nature of racial boundaries in the twenty-first Century and the expansion and experiences of people in the mainstream are hard to predict, but clearly require more social science research.

Conclusion

Richard Alba’s important work on ethnicity, race, immigration and assimilation has contributed a great deal to our understandings of these phenomena. But there is more work to be done. Many questions flow from Alba’s theoretical and empirical work. We outline three questions that we think scholars in the field should address.

First, what is the best way to define the end point of assimilation? The ‘mainstream’ is a concept that captures something about entering and being accepted by the core institutions and cultural and social realms of the receiving society. But it does not work well as a term for encapsulating that new identity created in the process. Perhaps we are hampered in our understanding of assimilation by the limitations of our vocabulary. ‘Whiteness’ often obscures more than it elucidates in an age of high racial intermarriage and more cosmopolitan elite institutions. Yet Alba and others are forced to use the white category on the census and other official statistics to assess assimilation among post 1965 immigrants and Americans who intermarry across racial lines because that is the category the government uses. But when he writes about these demographic changes, we believe what he is really describing is the growth of a more expansive category of belonging, one which represents an acceptance into a mainstream that is more mixed and less sharp bounded than in the past. This is not whiteness as has been historically understood. Nor is it ‘European American’ although for some it may be a pan ethnic category similar to ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Asian’. We need a new word to describe this changing category – whiteness simply carries too much baggage.

Unfortunately ‘mainstreamedness’ is a poor adjective and also has unfortunate implications of normality and membership. ‘American’ is worse, and given the baggage associated with the American identity it remains to be seen if today’s immigrants and their children will adopt it as their own. In our study of second-generation young adults, we posited that becoming ‘New Yorkers’ – the term they were more likely to use – better described what they were doing than ‘becoming American’ (Kasinitz et al. 2008). ‘New Yorkers’ encapsulated the diversity of the city and the common lives these diverse young people lived with their neighbors. In a time of regional and political polarization and division it would be good to have a definition of our common future, one which includes all of the different people who are part of our society. We need more scholarship that not only defines the mainstream but also describes its boundaries and how they shift to accommodate newcomers and their descendants.

Perhaps one fruitful approach would be to pay more attention to the everyday life practices of multi-ethnic cities, and to what Gilroy calls their ‘conviviality;’ that is, the ability to be ‘at ease’ with diversity (Gilroy 2004). At a time of increased ‘culturalization of citizenship’ (Slootman and Duyvendak 2015) we might profit from paying less attention to whether newcomers and more established members of a given society become more similar over time (although as Alba’s work demonstrates, under the right historical conditions this is likely to happen) than to understanding what circumstances promote casual acceptance, positive interaction and cooperation despite cultural differences. Indeed, as Jimenez (2017) has suggested in the US and Crul and Lelie (2023) have observed in Europe the ‘other side of assimilation’ or the broadening of the ‘mainstream’ (for lack of a better term) depends less on people coming to share values or behaviors than in an ability live together while according each other the respect due to fellow members of society. We need to know more about what circumstances promote ‘conviviality’, and what situations discourage it.

Second, we need more empirical work on the meaning of race in the twenty-first Century, including what people believe when they identify as White, as well as Black, Asian, Hispanic and American Indian. One hundred years ago it is obvious to us now looking back that the meaning and boundaries of race were changing as new immigrants were absorbed. Alba has suggested that the meaning and boundaries of race are once again changing. Political agendas about the meaning of being white on both the right and the left suggest that whites should see themselves as possessing a strong racial identity – either as part of a white supremacist agenda, or an anti-racist agenda. Yet the majority of whites seem to see white as not much more than a category they check when asked, one that does not influence their political beliefs, or that they strongly identify strongly with.

Third, we need ongoing longitudinal studies of both immigrants and their descendants and native born Americans as the immigrants and the natives change over time. Assimilation is a two way street. It also takes time. It did so for the white ethnics, as Alba’s work reminds us. And it will probably do so for the descendants of more recent immigrants. Cross sectional studies can only go so far, and we need scholars with a long-range view to chronicle these important changes.

Meanwhile, we should acknowledge the enormous contributions Richard Alba has made to understanding immigration, ethnicity, race, and assimilation. Over the course of his long career Alba has given us both the empirical data and the theoretical tools to understand the profound demographic and social changes that have diversified the U.S. and Western Europe. In an era when social science often concentrates on small answerable questions that few actually care about, or large political questions and sweeping ideological assertions that fail to persuade anyone not already convinced, Alba has given us a model of how social science can be both relevant and rigorous. His scholarship has taught us a great deal about diversity, social change and patterns of inequality. It has also set an ambitious agenda for our collective work going forward.

Declaration of interest statement

The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Kyle Waldman who helped us improve the manuscript. (He still disagrees with us on a number of points).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 It is common for historians making the case for the racialization of “ethnic” whites in early 20th century America to point to the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta or of Italian immigrants in Louisiana. These horrific events certainly illustrate how, once lynching and other modes of extra-legal terrorist violence towards Blacks were accepted as a way of enforcing white supremacy they came to be used against other “outsiders” as well. Yet we should not forget that the number of such cases was very small compared to the thousands of lynchings of African Americans during the same period.

2 In this regard we see the increasingly popular use of the acronym “BIPOC” for “Black, Indigenous, People of Color” as a positive development. While is recognizes that racism effects all nonwhite (“people of color” or POC) groups to greater or lesser degree, the situation of African Americans and Indigenous Americans remains distinct. See Ray et al. 2017).

3 This line or argument has at times been described as “neo-Weberian” (Favell 2022). It is interesting to note that during the first decade of the 20th century no less a Weberian than Max Weber (no “neo” necessary) observed that different rules of racial identity were applied to different racial groups and that the rules defining Black identity in the United States were more extreme than for other groups. In Economy and Society, he writes: “In the United States the smallest admixture of Negro blood disqualifies a person unconditionally whereas very considerable admixtures of Indian blood do not.” He goes on to argue that this probably has less to do with physical appearance or perceived racial or cultural difference than the fact that “Negros were slaves and hence disqualified in the status hierarchy, anthropological differences account for little.” He further speculates that the American “abhorrence” of inter-racial sex and Black-white marriage is the result of the “Negroes demand for equal civil rights” which challenged the white “monopolization of social power and honor … ” (Weber 1978, 386–387).

4 Percentage ranges are reported because of variability across measures in different time periods.