SES Mobility in Sociology of Assimilation: Three Logical Fallacies and an Alternative Boundary Model of Majority-Minority Relations


Aryan Karimi, University of British Columbia; Rima Wilkes, University of British Columbia

About 15 years ago, Dr. Herbert Gans penned a paper on the question of how to explain the historical assimilation, i.e., racial recategorization, of the European ethnics into White Americans. Pointing to the popular hypothesis on socioeconomic status (SES) mobility as a causal factor, he asked “whether, when and how assimilation causes or leads to mobility; but also, whether mobility causes or leads to assimilation” (ibid: 152). Simply, how does SES mobility translate into changing a group’s racial label? This question opens Pandora’s box since the century-old race and assimilation theories have yet to theorize the causal link between class mobility and assimilation into another ethnoracial group. In this paper, we revisit the merits of the SES mobility hypothesis. Since the 1970s, assimilation researchers have measured the changes in four aspects of a group’s SES comprising the rates of employment, education and language skills, intermarriage, and residential proximity-segregation from other groups. The purpose, initially, was to explain how, in the encounters between the two groups of White Anglo-Saxons and European ethnics, the ethnics were recategorized into Whites. Next, the goal became to make predictions about non-European immigrants’ ethnoracial recategorization versus White Americans. The core hypothesis is that the ethnics’ increasing rates of SES mobility pushed them into the White category and that SES mobility will lead to non-Europeans’ inclusion in the White American or the mainstream category. There are three logical fallacies in this SES hypothesis. First, the argument that one group experiences SES upward mobility into another racial group presumes that the first group is exclusively working-class and the latter group of middle-class status. The defective induction fallacy creates this distorted view of ethnoracial groups by overgeneralizing the characteristics of an unrepresentative sample to the entire group or nation. Second, using the SES measures to explain assimilation became popular in the 1970s-80s after the ethnics had already become White Americans. As such, the researchers hypothesized the effect of SES measures after-the-fact, but, in the absence of longitudinal data, could not test the measures by controlling for the effect of other confounding variables. This is a post-hoc fallacy, or the after-the-fact extraction and operationalization of untested measures. Third, data show that non-Europeans now nearly resemble White Americans in SES while the prospects of racial recategorization are nowhere in sight. To remedy this mismatch between SES and racial categories, some scholars have added new measures such as the impact of mixed-race children and past racial exclusions on assimilation outcomes while others modify the outcome by arguing that the boundaries of majority group or the mainstream is expanding to include the newcomers. This is a moving the goalpost fallacy which changes the hypothesis’ measures and outcomes when faced with adverse evidence. If SES mobility is not a cause of assimilation, then the question becomes: how did the ethnics, who were present in the U.S. for several decades and as late as the 1970s were predicted to linger on, suddenly became White Americans exactly at the time that the non-Europeans arrived in the U.S. in mass numbers? We offer a boundary model of how the group boundaries changed. Instead of a two-group logic, as per the assimilation hypothesis, we argue that, in the post-1965 era there were three groups, the Anglo-Saxons, the ethnics, and the non-Europeans. Given the dichotomous logic of the organization of social life, a two-group scenario cannot become a one-group arrangement, through SES mobility or other means, while a three-group encounter likely recategorizes into an us-them dichotomy on some levels. Post-1965, the Whiteness boundary expanded to merge the Anglo-Saxons and the ethnics into one group.

This paper will be presented at the following session: