In the US, assimilation policies, in turn, are based on the idea that immigrants should adopt the language, customs, and values of the national majority, and abandon their own cultural heritage. Assimilationist policies thus aim to homogenize the population and reduce cultural diversity.
The federal government aimed to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream US society by encouraging them toward farming and agriculture, which meant dividing tribal lands into individual plots. Only the Native Americans who accepted the division of tribal lands were allowed to become US citizens.
The policy of assimilation was an attempt to destroy traditional Indian cultural identities. Many historians have argued that the U.S. government believed that if American Indians did not adopt European-American culture they would become extinct as a people.
(Assimilation means to blend into a different culture.) To encourage assimilation, the government passed a law called the Dawes Act in 1887. It offered free farmland and help for Indian families that chose to leave their tribe and become settled, independent farmers. Some Indians accepted the offer.
Several main reasons why Indian assimilation failed were because of “land expropriation, reservation confinement, the racial antagonism of many Whites, and the desire to teach Indians the ways of Euro-American civilization before integrating them into American society”.
African-Americans were assimilated in several ways: Migration, Accommodation, and Schooling.
Forced assimilation is an involuntary process of cultural assimilation of religious or ethnic minority groups during which they are forced to adopt the language, identity, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, way of life, and often religion and ideology of established and generally larger .
The Importance of Assimilation in Adaptation
Indigenous Boarding Schools
Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the U.S. enacted laws and policies to establish and support Native American Boarding Schools. The goal was to civilize [Euro-Americanize] Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. Religious and private institutions often received federal funding and were willing partners.
Although tribes were native to this land and helped Europeans survive through
harsh weather and a bad harvest, they were segregated into reservations, made poor, and forced to simulate Euro-American culture.
The schools were usually harsh, especially for younger children who had been forcibly separated from their families and forced to abandon their Native American identities and cultures. Children also sometimes died in the school system due to infectious diseases.
A federal study of Native American boarding schools that sought to assimilate Indigenous children into white society has identified more than 400 such schools and more than 50 associated burial sites.
There were more than 350 government-funded, and often church-run, Indian Boarding schools across the US in the 19th and 20th centuries. Indian children were forcibly abducted by government agents, sent to schools hundreds of miles away, and beaten, starved, or otherwise abused when they spoke their native languages.
The last Indian boarding school closed in 1996. Children between the ages of 4-16 attended these schools; It is estimated that over 150,000 Indian, Inuit, and Métis children attended Indian boarding schools.
Migration
After the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, racial inequality persisted across the South during the 1870s, and the segregationist policies known as “Jim Crow” soon became the law of the land.
The Great Migration Begins
When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, industrialized urban areas in the North, Midwest, and West faced a shortage of industrial laborers, as the war put an end to the steady tide of European immigration to the United States.
With war production kicking into high gear, recruiters enticed African Americans to come north, to the dismay of white Southerners. Black newspapers—particularly the widely read Chicago Defender—published advertisements touting the opportunities available in the cities of the North and West, along with first-person accounts of success.
During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting racial prejudice as well as economic, political, and social challenges to create a Black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come.
Did you know? Around 1916, when the Great Migration began, a factory wage in the urban North was typically three times more than what Black people could expect to make working the land in the rural South.
Discriminatory Laws Regarding Blacks
Accommodations
The two major schools of thought emerged at the end of the century to solve the problems of black social and economic distress. The accommodationists, like Booker T. Washington, believed that the quickest way to improve the quality of black life was to forge a social peace with powerful whites, temporarily accepting the continued separation of the races and advocating vocational education as a pragmatic way for blacks to improve their lives.
Opposed to Washington were people like Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois who embraced assimilation and saw higher education as the cure-all to racialized problems. Du Bois, in particular, is famous for his assertion that it would be the “Talented Tenth” of the race who would lead blacks to a better life.
Boundaries did not exist between Asian Americans and other racial/ethnic minorities, such as Blacks and Latinos because of Racial Inclusion.
Pressures and incentives related to funding, shared interests, and organizational survival may encourage community-based organizations (CBOs) to engage in cross-racial work, but these factors do not necessarily sustain racial inclusion over time. Instead, how leaders identify and construct a sense of expanded group boundaries for the community that they serve and represent helps an organization to commit to racial inclusion.
The government created boundaries between African-Americans and Whites due to misunderstandings. Such laws include redlining.
In the 1930s, the FHA refused to insure houses for Black families, or even insure houses in white neighborhoods that were too close to Black ones. The assistance program not only limited recipients to white Americans but also established and then reinforced housing segregation in the United States, effectively drawing lines between white and Black neighborhoods that would persist for generations.
For example, in 1940, the FHA denied insurance to a private builder in Detroit because he intended to construct a housing development near a predominantly Black neighborhood. The FHA only wanted to insure houses in white neighborhoods.
Schooling
Public school teachers taught their students about American cultural values, such as thrift, patriotism & hard work. Students also learned to cook traditional American foods & play American games such as baseball. The nation’s form of dance is rooted in cowboy culture. The art of Square Dance was taught in elementary.
History.com1, History.com2, Yale University
