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.