Assimilation versus Multiculturalism: The Views of Urban Americans

Author(s): Wallace E. Lambert and Donald M. Taylor

Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter, 1988), pp. 72-88
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/684622 .
Accessed: 23/02/2011 18:04
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Sociological Forum.

http://www.jstor.org

Assimilation versus Multiculturalism: The

Views of Urban Americans
Wallace E. Lambert and Donald M. Taylor
McGill University

Parents of children in public schools in a large American urban

center, representing a number of different ethnic groups, were interviewed about their personal views and feelings toward cultural
and racial diversity in America today. Three main issues were addressed: respondents' attitudes toward the maintenance of heritage cultures versus assimilation; their attitudes toward bilingualism; and their attitudes toward other groups in the community.
The analyses revealed important differences in attitudes between
ethnic minority groups and established white and black groups.
Nonetheless, strong support was shown for the retention of heritage cultures, even among middle-class white and working-class
black Americans. The working-class white American sample was
distinctive in its rejection of multiculturalism and in its negative
attitudes toward other ethnic and racial groups. All groups supported the idea of bilingualismfor their children, and certain groups
thought that public schools had an important role to play in its
promotion. Overall, the results delineate a series of factors that
affect intragroup and intergroup harimonyand the processes of adjustment that transpire within a social system when it has to cope
with ethnic and racial diversity.
An observer recently summarized the American character in terms of
three national preoccupations: war and peace, bread and butter, and
black and white. Interesting as this overview is, it misses what may be
the most distinctive feature of all, namely, a preoccupation with what
* This is a summary of the main results of a community-based study. The complete manuscript, available in mimeograph form, is titled "Culturaland Racial Diversity in the Lives
of Urban Americans:The Hamtramck/Pontiac Study"(Lambert and Taylor, 1986). We are
very grateful to the Spencer Foundation for their financial and personal support of the
study and to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada,grant number
410-87-0098. Dr. Naomi Holobow helped us with the data analysis and interpretation.
We are also indebted to four students at McGill for their discussions and interpretations
of the findings: Geoffrey Hall, Lambros Mermigis, Gertie Witte, and BarbaraGasiorek. We
are especially grateful to Clarence Pilatowitz, Elba Berlin, Marcia Nowakowski, Nicholas
Prychitko, John Radwanski and Maria Etienne, educators in the greater Detroit school
system, for their cooperation and support throughout the investigation.
? 1988 by the Eastern Sociological
0884-8971/88/0301-0072
$1.50

72

Sociological

Society. All rights reserved.

Forum Volume 3 Number 1

Multiculturalism
is or what is not "American."The present study deals indirectly with
this concern. It is a community-based investigation of the attitudes of
Americans-some long-term residents and others first or second generation immigrants-toward ethnic diversity and intergroup relations.
The focus of the research is a fundamental and long-standing debate in America about how immigrants, as well as established ethnic
minority groups, can and should accommodate to mainstream society
and be accommodated by it. In this debate, two contrasting ideological
positions are highlighted: assimilation, the belief that cultural minorities should give up their so-called "heritage" cultures and take on the
"American" way of life, and multiculturalism,

the view that these groups

should maintain their heritage cultures as much as possible.

This debate has had a rich theoretical and empirical history in the
sociology of ethnic relations (see Hirschman, 1983). The assimilation
perspective (e.g., Park and Burgess, 1921; Gordon, 1964) was and according to some "continues to be the primary theoretical framework"
(Hirschman, 1983:401). More recently, the assimilation view has been
seriously challenged by those who suggest a revival of ethnicity (e.g.,
Glazer and Moynihan, 1970; Greely, 1974; Novak, 1972). The ethnic
revival perspective, while gaining much momentum, has itself, however,
been challenged by others (e.g., Alba, 1981; Gans, 1979) who question
the depth of the alleged resurgence of ethnic awareness over the last
two decades.
In order to gauge contemporary views on these issues and especially the role that attitudes play, we chose to conduct this study in a
large American metropolitan area which, like many others in the United
States, is continually accommodating to the social pressures generated
by daily contacts among members of a large arrayof ethnic groups, some
visible "minorities" and others hardly visible at all. Urban centers and
inner-city public schools in the United States are unmistakably diverse
in cultural and racial composition. The underlying concern of our study
is how communities and schools adjust to the social tensions among
members of such a variety of ethnic and racial groups.
We focused on parents whose children were attending public
schools in a large, midwestern urban setting. In probing their views on
assimilation and multiculturalism, we took care to present both the favorable and unfavorable arguments commonly associated with each alternative. For instance, respondents who favored assimilation were then
asked if this option would promote national unity and provide a common national language, and also if it would oblige newcomers to abandon something precious to them and if the nation might lose the best
that other cultural groups had to offer. Similarly, respondents who favored multiculturalism were asked if this would dangerously diversify
the nation and increase language barriers, and also if this would permit
73

Sociological

Forum

newcomers to keep their identity, generate intergroup tolerance, and

conserve each group's distinctive contributions.
Three overriding issues were addressed: attitudes about the maintenance of heritage culture (multiculturalism) versus assimilation; views
about the maintenance and use of heritage languages (bilingualism); attitudes toward the respondent's own group and toward other prominent
ethnic groups in the community (the issue of intergroup harmony or
conflict).
The participants in the study were all parents of children enrolled
in public schools in either Hamtramckor Pontiac, two ethnically diverse
communities adjacent to Detroit, Michigan. The participants were chosen because they belonged to one of the four major ethnic groups living
in Hamtramck:Polish Americans, Arab Americans, Albanian Americans,
black Americans; or one of the five major ethnic groups living in Pontiac: Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, black Americans,
working-class white Americans, or middle-class white Americans. According to plan, all groups but one comprised respondents from lower
working-class backgrounds; the exception was the middle-class whites
who were included as an important reference group. A distinctive demographic feature of the greater Detroit area is that working-classwhites
are, in large proportion, families from the South who have been in the
motor industries for generations and who keep close ties with relatives
in the southern states.
We selected from the literature certain standard measures of attitudes and values that seemed appropriate for our purposes and developed others that focused on particular combinations of feelings, attitudes, and points of view. The measuring instruments had to be
unmistakably straightforward and understandable for use with mainly
working-class respondents. They also had to be psychometrically sound
and so worded that parents would think seriously about particular issues
and give us candid, spontaneous reactions. It should be mentioned that
the terms "multiculturalism"and "assimilation,"which might well have
been confusing, were never used in the interviews. Rather, alternative
wording, such as "maintain"or "keep" versus "give up" or "not use,"
was employed.
Once developed and pretested, the final interview schedule was
professionally translated into Arabic, Polish, Albanian, and Spanish and
tested again with small samples of each of our target groups. Because
some parents might have had trouble reading questions, it was decided
that the interviewers would read questions aloud and that parents would
give their responses in terms of Likert-type numerical scales that accompanied each item. Thus every question required a response on a
seven-point scale defined at one end (1) by such qualifiers as "not at
all" or "disagree" and at the other (7) with "extremely" or "agree to74

Multiculturalism
tally"; four (4) represented the midpoint on each scale. Although the
interviews were kept informal and interpersonal, the respondents were
taken through a predetermined progression of questions designed so
that systematic psychometric analyses could be carried out on their responses.
Two to four interviewers were selected from within each ethnic
group on the basis of recognized respectability. Thus the majority were
teachers, social workers, nurses, or the like. All interviewers were fluent
bilinguals in a heritage language and English, except for those interviewing English-speaking mainstream Americans. That they were in all
cases coethnics with the respondents meant that although they held
responsible positions, their family backgrounds were typical of the
working-class family backgrounds of the respondents. The middle-class
white group was interviewed by middle-class whites and the workingclass white group, comprising mainly southern whites, was interviewed
by a high school teacher and his wife who were unmistakably southern
whites themselves.
The use of coethnics posed a potential problem in that we might
expect that being interviewed by a member of one's own ethnic group
could bias respondents toward multiculturalism. That the interviewers
were recognized as effectively bicultural and bilingual, however, presumably reduced such a bias. In any case, it would have been impossible
to gain the confidence of these difficult-to-access communities with interviewers not of the same ethnic background.
POLISH, ARAB, AND ALBANIAN AMERICANS1
Despite a host of minor and sometimes major differences in attitude and outlook, there is a surprising degree of consensus and agreement within and among all the key ethnic groups in Hamtramck concerning certain fundamental issues. Polish, Arab, and AlbanianAmericans
in our sample were all strongly committed to the idea of multiculturalism, and they all rejected assimilation as a viable strategy for newcomers to America. The Polish parents, while not as extreme as the Arab
and Albanian parents, nevertheless showed a clear endorsement of multiculturalism, which is especially strong considering that many of this
group are third generation in the United States. The extent of the position taken by these and all other ethnic groups surveyed is depicted
graphically in Figure 1.
1
Since this article is essentially a summary of a large-scale investigation, we present here
only the major findings; detailed descriptions of methods and data are available in the
complete writeup (Lambert and Taylor, 1986). Any summary, by definition, provides an
oversimplified and therefore overinterpreted profile that does not do justice to the richness of the perceptions and opinions expressed by the individual parents in our study.

75

Sociological Forum
PRO
MULTICULTURALISM
7 -

zn

.....

......

n LNU

ON

..
.~~~~~~~~~~~~jLaJ~~~~....

I-

HAMTRNEUTRALNPOIN

RESPONDENTS

RESPONDENTS

PRO
ASSIMILATION

FIGURE1. Group Comparisons of Mean Responses on the Debate over

Assimilation versus Multiculturalism

Parents from all three groups believed as well that being bilingual
in both the heritage language and English would be a great advantage
for their children. The advantages they saw were not limited to feelings
of ethnic identity and family solidarity but extended to the world or
work. The degree of their support for bilingualism is presented graphically in Figure 2. These two figures help to portray one of our major
conclusions, namely that these samples of ethnic parents want opportunities for themselves and their children to juggle two cultures, that
is, to become bicultural and bilingual Americans rather than to give up
heritage cultures and languages to become "American."In short, their
responses suggest that they want members of their families to become
"double breeds" rather than single breeds or, possibly, half-breeds.
Beyond these fundamental similarities, certain key differences in
perspective emerge. In Hamtramck, the Polish parents are not quite as
committed as the other ethnic groups to multiculturalism and are not
as extreme in terms of the extent to which they think the school should
play a role in the maintenance of the heritage language. They appear,
however, to have a constellation of attitudes that one would expect of
those with a long-standingand secure status within the community. They
have a relatively positive self-image; they are optimistic but realistic in
their aspirations for their children; and they tend to be relatively toterant in their attitudes toward other groups in the community.
Albanian parents are totally committed to multiculturalism and bi76

Multiculturalism

WEREBILINGUAL
IFYOURCHILDREN

O IFYOURCHILDRENSPOKEONLYENGLISH
LANGUAGE
YOURHERITAGE
SPOKEONLY
* IFYOURCHILDREN
BE SYMPATHETIC
THEYWOULD
TOPEOPLEFROMDIFFERENT
GROUPS
ANDRACIAL
CULTURAL

7 e _

54
3

2
THEYWOULD
NOTBE
TOOTHERS
SYMPATHETIC

FEELA SENSE
THEYWOULD
OFPRIDEABOUTWHO
THEYARE

4
3

2
THEYWOULDNOT
FEELPROUD

HAVEA CHANCE
THEYWOULD
CANTGET
FORJOBSOTHERS

7
6

4
3

2
NOTHAVEA
THEYWOULD
POLISH ARAB ALBANIAN BLACK

RESPONDENTS
FIGURE 2.

Parents' Views on Value of Bilingualism:

for Hamtramck Respondents

A Sample

of Scales

77

Sociological

Forum

lingualism. They have an extremely favorable self-image but are quite

negative toward other groups, particularlytoward blacks. They also have
extremely and perhaps unrealistically high aspirations for their children
in the world of work.
The zeal for multiculturalism and bilingualism found among the
Albanian parents is shared by the Arab sample. They too have an extremely high self-image; they are especially favorable to the idea of Arabic being used in the public school systems; and they are quite negative toward other groups, again particularly toward blacks. They have
high aspirations for their children but very modest expectations. In this
sense, there would seem to be far less parental pressure for achievement
placed on the Arab children than on the Albanian children.
These basic ethnic contrasts are in accord with key value differences, measured by Kluckhohn's (1950) scale of values. For example,
compared to Polish parents, Arab and Albanian parents are distinctively
more prone to remain close to the nuclear family and to be fatalistic
toward life. Also, compared to the Polish parents, the Arabs stress the
importance of finding a safe place within an organization rather than
striving for individual recognition, while Albanianparents emphasize the
futility of planning ahead. We suspect that this distinctive value profile
may underlie their tendency to pressure their children to perform by
exaggerating the chances of success and by expecting very high levels
of accomplishment.
PUERTO RICAN AND MEXICAN AMERICANS
The parents representing the two Hispanic groups in PontiacPuerto Rican and Mexican Americans-strongly endorse multiculturalism (see Figure 1). Puerto Rican parents are especially committed to
maintaining their heritage culture and language. Both samples of Hispanic parents are also as favorable toward bilingualism as were the ethnic groups in Hamtramck. Both Puerto Rican and Mexican respondents
feel that their children will benefit in terms of their social identity and
in the practical world of work by being fluent in both Spanish and English.
Puerto Rican American parents take a particularly strong stance
on the role public schools should play in promoting bilingualism. While
Mexican American parents want their children to be bilingual, they feel
that community-based language classes might be an appropriate context
for maintaining the heritage language. Puerto Rican American parents,
however, believe that the public school has a responsibility to promote
both Spanish and English for their children.
Both Mexican and Puerto Rican American parents have a positive
image of their own group. The Puerto Rican respondents, in fact, ex78

Multiculturalism
pressed an extremely favorable self-image, in terms of their ratings of
Puerto Ricans, relative to other groups, as powerful, likable, smart with
practical things, intelligent, and law-abiding. That is, their self-images
were not tempered with the reality and humility shown by most other
groups of parents. With regard to other ethnic groups in the community,
the Hispanic parents are relatively favorable and accepting. Still they
show a bias for their own group when asked about having members of
other ethnic groups enter their families through marriage. The Puerto
Rican American parents are especially cautious in that they are not even
very favorably disposed to close social interaction with Mexican Americans.

WHITE MIDDLE- AND WORKING-CLASS AMERICANS

How do our samples of white Americans feel about multiculturalism and assimilation? Do their perspectives on these issues clash with
those of ethnic newcomers? The research suggests two quite different
answers to these questions, one for middle-class whites and a second
for working-class whites. Middle-class white parents revealed a surprisingly favorable perspective on multiculturalism, one that suggests an appreciation for the adjustment pressures experienced by ethnic newcomers and black Americans alike. They have favorable attitudes toward each
of the ethnic groups, including blacks, in the community; they assign
each group positive personal attributes; and they express willingness to
interact with other groups at all levels of social distance. They also support the idea of keeping heritage cultures and languages alive in the
home and community, but draw the line at having public schools use
languages other than English in instruction. For their own children,
however, they prize bilingualism developed through schooling for its
social, intellectual, and career-related consequences. We interpreted this
comparatively strong support of multiculturalism and this personal appreciation of ethnic newcomers as a derivative of the favorable self-view
the middle-class white parents displayed, including feeling secure in their
social position.
At the same time, white working-class parents displayed a quite
different, essentially hostile attitude not only toward multiculturalism
but also toward ethnic newcomers and minorities. Our white workingclass sample was comprised mainly of people who had come to Detroit
from various southern states, keeping family and residential contacts in
both places and moving from one site to another depending on available
work. Thus we can in no sense generalize these results to other working-class white Americans. This particular group, with their own distinctively southern American cultural heritage, takes a neutral stand on
the debate about multiculturalismversus cultural assimilation.Other than
79

Sociological

Forum

this neutrality, their attitudes toward all other ethnic groups in the community are negative and stereotyped to the point of being disdainful.
They attribute no favorable characteristicsto any group other than white
Americans, and they are inclined to keep all other groups at extreme
social distances, ethnic newcomers as well as blacks. This generally negative attitude shows itself as well in their manner of questioning why
ethnic newcomers should want to keep heritage cultures and languages
alive and in the strong stand they take against culture and language
training, other than "American,"in the public schools. They do, though,
see substantial advantages for their own children were they to become
bilingual.
The profile of values of the working-class whites on the Kluckhohn
scale differs noticeably from that of the middle-classwhites, making them
less like the middle-class whites than are the two Hispanic groups. Similarly, their stand against racially and ethnically mixed public schooling
not only makes them the distinctively odd group in the community but
also makes them the only group that appears racist in outlook.
In sum, then, what we found is a community where the more established,mainstreamwhite parents fall into two strikinglydifferentgroups
in terms of attitudes. The white middle-class group emerges as supportive of multiculturalism, whereas the white working-class group appears suspicious, unfriendly, and potentially threatened by cultural and
racial diversity. This clear contrast in the attitudes of two subgroups of
white Americans may pose difficulties for both ethnic newcomers and
long-term minorities as they try to adjust to the American scene; if they
generalize about white mainstreamAmericans,from one social-classgroup
to the other, they would likely be misled.
BLACK AMERICANS
What about black Americans' perspectives on multiculturalism,
multilingualism, and public education? Are they consonant or dissonant
with those of other ethnic minority groups and with those of mainstream white Americans? Since we surveyed separate samples of black
parents in Hamtramck and Pontiac, we have a relatively broad base for
drawing the following conclusions.
It became clear that black American parents are generally favorable toward multiculturalism and generally against assimilation. Their
attitudes toward other ethnic groups are most similar to those of the
socially dominant group in the community. Thus in Hamtramck, their
attitude profile approaches that of Polish Americans and in Pontiac, the
profile of middle-class whites. In both places, black parents give consistent arguments to bolster their stand, as, for example, that pressures
to assimilate would perturb the identities of ethnic minorities and that
80

Multiculturalism
the nation would lose the best that each ethnic group has to offer. They
recognize that multiculturalism would diversify the cultural norms in
the nation, but they do not think this would necessarily promote disunity or social conflict. Blacks support strongly the idea that ethnic groups
should keep their cultural histories and their traditions alive not only
within the family and community but also in the public schools, suggesting, even, that equal time should be devoted to such cultural histories as to general American history. This strong position on culture
in the schools brings them close to the Arab and Albanian American
parents in Hamtramck and to the Mexican and Puerto Rican parents in
Pontiac. On this one issue, they draw away from the middle-class whites,
who support culture maintenance in the home and community but not
in the public schools.
On the issue of heritage language maintenance, black parents would
like their own children to develop full bidialectal skills involving black
English and standard American English, but in their eyes having command of black English only would be dysfunctional and inappropriate.
The generality of their position is seen in the strong endorsement they
give to other minority groups' attempts to keep their heritage languages
alive. They feel that these other languages should be kept up at home
and in the community but are hesitant about having ethnic languages
used in the public schools. Thus they argue that heritage cultures should
be sustained in public schools much more than heritage languages. This
position brings the blacks in line with Polish American parents in Hamtramck and away from the Arabs and Albanians, and in Pontiac, it makes
them very similar to middle-class whites and different from the Hispanics.

The attitudes of black parents toward their own and other ethnic
groups are particularly revealing. Their overall self-view is only moderately favorable. They see themselves foremost as very "American"and
very "unfairlytreated." In comparison with other groups, they are "likable," "determined to succeed," "smart,""intelligent," and "hardworking." They also perceive themselves to be rather "aggressive and violent," and not fully "trustworthy."Their views of other groups are simnilarly
balanced with good and less good attributes. Violence is apparently very
salient in their judgments of themselves and others, but they see blacks
as no more aggressive or violent than Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Albanian Americans, and as even less aggressive and violent than white Americans. They view white Americans as particularly "powerful" as well as
very "American,"making whites and blacks much alike except for differences in power and its consequences, which translates to unfair treatment of blacks.
In general, blacks hold basically favorable views of other ethnic
groups, and they rate themselves similarly. They recognize that certain
81

Sociological

Forum

other ethnic groups are somewhat favorable towards blacks (e.g., the
Polish Americans and the middle-class whites), and in these instances
they contribute to a mutuality of respect and appreciation. They are also
aware of which groups are racist or at least anti black (e.g., the workingclass whites and the Arabs and Albanians), but they do not reciprocate
particularly hostile sentiments. As a group, then, the black American
parents are accepting and charitable toward various ethnic groups, making their social attitudes much like those of the middle-class whites and
the Polish Americans, the two groups with most power and privilege in
the two communities studied.
This similarity to the middle-class whites shows up in their value
profiles on the Kluckhohn scale, suggesting that whatever the "American" way of life might be, blacks contribute as much to these national
values as do mainstream whites. That is, blacks are similar to the more
privileged whites and dissimilar to other ethnic groups whose values or
social attitudes deviate from certain "American"standards, as when, for
instance, the Arab Americans place much stress on staying close to one's
family or seeking a safe place of work in a large organization, or when
Arab and Albanian parents question the value of coeducational schooling, or when working-class whites question the merits of racially or
ethnically mixed schooling.
This similarity of perspectives of black and middle-class whites in
our study parallels closely the findings of LorandSzalaywho discovered
that the "psychocultural distance between black and white Americans
was relatively narrow, compared with the distance between LatinAmerican immigrants and both groups" (Cunningham, 1984). Our work,
however, reveals striking differences between socioeconomic subgroups
of white Americans.
The black parents' outlooks for their children's occupational future
are similar to those of other groups: they would certainly like to have
their children end up in the top professions, but their real hope is that
they can at least become skilled workers. Unlike the white middle-class
parents, however, they realize that the chances of success for their children are very limited, making them willing to be tolerant of (if not delighted with) any work at all.
Black parents thus present themselves as supporters of multiculturalism, as a group that is sympathetic to other ethnic minorities, as a
people who have their own valued culture and language style to preserve, and as coshapers and cocontributors to an "Americanway of life."
PUTTING MULTICULTURALISM INTO PRACTICE
During the interviews, parents rated themselves in terms of their
fluency in their heritage language and in English. Four of the five ethnic
82

Multiculturalism
newcomer groups to America-the Arab, Albanian, Puerto Rican, and
Mexican Americans-reported that they have very strong skills in their
heritage languages. What is striking is that these four groups of adults
have kept these languages alive over varying years of residence in the
United States. Although more than 50 percent of the Arabic Americans
have been in the United States for ten to twenty-five years, for instance,
98 percent rate their skills in Arabic at the native fluency point on our
scales. There is no systematic relation, for these groups, between time
in the United States and loss of heritage language. There are no signs of
heritage language attritionover, in some cases, very long periods of United
States residence.
There are several ways of interpreting these outcomes. First, one
can view them as an indication of the foreign language resources to be
found in the United States. Here we have large proportions of four of
the five groups surveyed who have kept up native- or near-nativelike
control of Arabic, Albanian, and two cultural forms of Spanish. Maintaining the languagesin these cases also means introducing younger family
members to the languages and cultures, at least to the extent of developing minimum skills of understanding the spoken word. Second, these
findings suggest that there may be more resistance to the assimilation
process than the assimilationistsmight expect, even for those who might
want to wait for comparable data over longer time spans. Third, these
outcomes raise the question of the price language minority group parents pay when they resist linguistic and cultural assimilation in this fashion. From a societal perspective, it appears to be difficult to develop
maximum skills in English when the heritage language is maintained.
The Arab, Puerto Rican, and Albanian American parents rate themselves
as decidedly poorer in English than in the heritage language by a factor
of two full scale positions on our seven-point rating scales. Mainstream
Americans might well ask questions about this discrepancy, arguing that
minority language families jeopardize their chances of advancement in
the United States if deficits in English language skills are not surmounted. They might even argue that perhaps this resistance to assimilation through language has kept the respondents we are dealing with
in the working-class ranks. The Mexican American parents appear to
have met this challenge, however, since they rate themselves as equally
skilled in Spanish and English. As the Mexican American parents have
been in the United States for the longest period of time of any group
included in the study, their bilinguality suggests that with time, or in
spite of time, the two-language balancing act can be carried off successfully. But it could be argued that its success has taken continuous
input, through immigration, of new waves of Mexican Americans.
The Polish American parent group is the one exception among our
five language minority groups. They have not kept up Polish to a level
83

Sociological Forum
comparable to that of the heritage languages of the other four groups
and although their English is relatively stronger than their Polish, it is
not, on the average, considered perfectly nativelike. On the surface, this
might be interpreted as an example of a group being caught between
two cultures or two cultural sources of influence, leaving them with
nonnativelike control of either language. Actually, on analysis we find
two separate subgroups who contribute to the average: those in our
Polish sample who have only been in the United States for a short period
of time and who have not developed full skills in English but are strong
in Polish, and those who have been here for ten years or more and who
have nativelike skills in English, but who have not kept up Polish. And
yet both these subgroups turn up in our working-class Polish sample,
indicating that, while resistance to assimilation through language may
contribute to class status, it is not the determining factor. Clearly, more
research is called for on this complex issue. Our study reveals that language minority groups receive differing degrees of social pressure to
maintain heritage languages or to master the national language. Time of
residence in the United States seems to promote full Spanish-English
bilingualism for the Mexican Americans, while in the case of Polish
Americans, it promotes English at the expense of Polish.
Thus the majority of our parental groups keep their heritage languages alive. But how about their children? Certainly they will have
lived with parents who speak heritage languages, but there is no guarantee that the languages will be picked up and used. Other data throw
interesting light on these questions. Apparently, three of our groups
the Arab, Puerto Rican, and Albanian Americans-are able to relay the
heritage language to their children so that the latter are as nativelike in
the heritage language as their parents. In addition, the children appear
to have surpassed their parents by developing higher-level skills in English. Since we alreadyknow that the aim of all five ethnolinguistic groups
is to provide for full bilingual and bicultural competence for their children, it seems that in these three cases, the wishes of the parents are
being satisfied. We presume that skill in the heritage language has been
acquired in the home while English has simultaneously been brought
up to nativelike levels through the school and the outside-home environment. These outside-the-home influences are the likely catalysts that
permit the children to surpass the parents in English.
These three cases indicate that integration into a new society need
not entail the loss of heritage languages and cultures. Instead, the new
language and culture can be added, without necessarily replacing the
old. If the "replacement effects" of assimilation can be avoided, then the
second or third generation can more easily and more comfortably become bilingual and bicultural than can the first.
Of all five groups surveyed, the Mexican and Polish American fam84

Multiculturalism
ilies have been in the United States for the longest periods of time. We
find that children in long-standing Polish American families have very
limited skills in the heritage language and very strong skills in English.
Thus some ethnolinguistic groups do show the replacement or eradication effects of linguistic assimilation just as clearly as other groups
resist those effects by developing full bilingual abilities. Still to be discovered are the within-family and outside-family influences that underlie these very pronounced differences.
Will new generations of Arab, Puerto-Rican, and Albanian American children go the way of the Mexican and Polish American children
when their families have been in residence in the United States longer?
After some ten years of residence, the parents of these three groups
have themselves kept the heritage language strong, as have their children. But will new generations of Arab, Puerto Rican, or AlbanianAmerican parents keep these skills when they have been here for twenty or
thirty years, comparable to the residence time of the Mexican and Polish
American families in our study?
The Mexican and Polish American cases are puzzling from another
point of view. Why do these parents, who show such a strong desire to
maintain their heritage cultures and languages and to foster bilinguality
for their children, not keep the language alive over generations or, in
the case of the Polish parents, even within their own generation? Is it
that these particular parental groups discourage the amplification of the
heritage language, or is it that their children are under especially strong
pressure to become American and to erase traces of foreignness? These
questions can only be addressed through further research focused on
various within-family and outside-family factors that may or may not
support the promotion of biculturality and bilinguality through generations.
APPLYING MULTICULTURALISM IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL
SETTING
It is one thing for parents to have hopes for the maintenance of
heritage culture but a different and more demanding thing to make it
work. In the present study, we have found some cases where it is working effectively and where it could continue through generations, thereby
satisfying parental hopes. We have found other cases where it seems
not to be working and consequently leaves parental desires unsatisfied.
Events outside the family system sometimes change substantively
the normal course of heritage language usage. We brought about one
such event as part of this study. We had found that most ethnic groups
surveyed supported the idea of introducing heritage languages on a parttime basis in the public schools, although some suggested that com85

Sociological Forum
munity or church-run classes could be equally good alternatives. The
underlying arguments were, first, that use of the heritage language in
instruction could help language minority children grasp new concepts
through a familiar language and thus keep them from falling behind and,
second, that using a heritage language in school even on a part-time
basis would legitimize the cultural background of the children involved
and thereby enhance a sense of ethnic pride and identity. We already
knew that certain ethnic groups of parents would be particularlypleased
if such an intervention were possible. The Puerto Rican American parents, for instance, had given us the impression that Spanish should be
offered as a school language for their children as a right of citizenship.
Arab American parents had given the impression that the part-time use
of Arabic in school would buttress their own attempts to keep a valued
heritage alive.
The findings of our study-that all the ethnic groups in both Hamtramck and Pontiac wanted to retain their heritage cultures and languages; that all supported other ethnic groups in their desires for multiculturalism; and that all felt that public schools had at least some role
to play in this process-were presented in the form of feedback to
members of the ethnic communities and to the teaching staff and administrators of the local public schools. Several parents suggested conducting a pilot "educational experiment" in Arabic partial immersion
for a class of grade one pupils in Hamtramck.The basic idea was to give
these pupils an opportunity to be educated through their home language for half of each school day. The program was voluntary, and parents became involved from the start in planning the curriculum. The
school administrators in Hamtramck fully supported the idea.
Arabic was the major home language for the majority of pupils in
the pilot group, although, interestingly enough, four fully Anglophone
families registered their children for what they saw as an "enriching
experience." "Partialimmersion" means that for half of each school day
this subgroup of pupils moved to a separate room with a separate teacher,
leaving the other half of the class in the homeroom with an Englishspeaking teacher who followed a standard all-English curriculum. Those
who moved to the Arabic immersion teacher thus had half of their instruction presented exclusively through the Arabic language. This also
meant that they had half less time in English language instruction than
did the pupils who stayed with the English-speaking teacher, a point to
remember in the evaluations that follow.
The Arabic-speaking teacher taught all aspects of the subjects required by the conventional curriculum but did so in the Arabic language. The teacher also reserved a certain amount of instructional time
for Arabic language arts. This was needed to maintain age-appropriate
reading and writing skills in the language. In addition, since four pupils
86

Multiculturalism
in the program did not have an Arabic language background, the language arts element in their case was crucial for the development of
literacy skills.
Of special interest are the end-of-year achievement results for children who have had such an educational experience. The results of this
pilot study indicate that the Arabic partial immersion experience in no
apparent way placed these minority language pupils in jeopardy in their
development of English language skills, nor in other subject matters
measured by the subtests of the Metropolitan Achievement Test, an English language test. Thus, even though half of their instruction in mathematics, science, and social science was given in Arabic, they performed
as well on English tests of these matters as did the all-English, nonArabic control children. Developing Arabic skills had, if anything, helped
these pupils to keep up with and in one instance surpass English-speaking pupils on end-of-year tests of achievement in grade one subjects.
This finding is consonant with previous research with language minority
students who have the opportunity to learn partly through their own
language (see Lambert, 1984). Whether the same trends hold at higher
grades can only be determined by following these children, and the
follow-up groups that are coming into the first grade and the immersion
program, as they advance in years.

CONCLUSION
In summary, this study was planned as an up-to-date pulse-taking
of urban Americans' attitudes toward multiculturalism versus cultural
assimilation. It was found that (1) there is strong cross-subgroup support for culture and language maintenance not only from working-class
subgroups of ethnolinguistic minority groups but also from workingclass blacks and middle-class whites; (2) there is support for multiculturalism even from certain subgroups who have resided in the United
States for over twenty-five years (e.g., Polish and Mexican Americans);
(3) all subgroups support bilingualism for their children, not only for
cultural and identity reasons, but also because bilingualism is seen as a
means of enhancing economic and career advancement; (4) all ethnolinguistic immigrant groups endorse the idea of public school involvement in teaching about heritage cultures, with support also from two
long-term resident groups, the blacks and middle-class whites; (5) some
groups, (e.g., the Arabs, the Albanians, and the Hispanics) believe that
public schools should use heritage languages for instruction, while others (the Polish, blacks, and the middle-class whites) have reservations;
and (6) the working-class white group is distinctly out of line with all
others because of attitudes and values that are negative toward multiculturalism as well as racist.
87

Sociological Forum
REFERENCES
Alba, R. D.
1981 "The twilight of ethnicity among
American Catholics of European ancestry." Annals of the American
Academy of Political Social Science
454:86-97.

Cunningham, S.
1984 "Cultureplays important role in our
beliefs." American Psychological
Corporation Monitor 15:8-9.
Gans, H.
1979 "Symbolic ethnicity: The future of
ethnic groups and culture in America." Ethnic and Racial Studies 2:120.
Glazer, N. and D. P. Moynihan.
1970 Beyond the Melting Pot. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
Gordon, M. M.
1964 Assimilation in American Life. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Greely, A. M.
1974 Ethnicity in the United States: A
Preliminary Reconnaissance. New
York: Wiley.
Hirschman, C.
1983 "America's melting pot reconsid-

88

ered." Annual Review of Sociology

9:397-423.
Kluckhohn, F.
1950 "Dominant and substitute profiles of
cultural orientations." Social Forces
38:376-393.
Lambert, W. E.
1984 "An overview of issues in immersion education." In California State
Department of Education, Studies in
Immersion Education: A Collection
for United States Educators. Sacramento, CA:State Department of Education.
Lambert, W. E. and D. M. Taylor
1986 "Culturaland racial diversity in the
lives of urban Americans." Mimeo,
Department of Psychology, McGill
University.
Novak, R. D.
1972 The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics.
New York: Macmillan.
Park, R. E. and E. W. Burgess
1921 Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.