Civilization, culture, and color: Changing foundations of Robert E. Park's sociology of race relations

Abstract

In an autobiographical note that was found after his death, Robert E. Park stated that he had, finally, become convinced that in his researches on blacks in the South, he had in fact been "observing the historical process by which civilization, not merely here but elsewhere, has evolved, drawing into. . . its influence an ever widening circle of races and peoples."1 In its broadest sense, Park's sociology of race and ethnic relations takes the civilizational process as its central concern. His well-known formulation of the four stages through which a race relations cycle would pass?viz., con? tacts, competition, accommodation, assimilation2 ?though not without con? siderable difficulties as a theory describing the order and direction taken by the several races' actual experiences3 postulates the ultimate victory of modern market civilization over all traditional modes of social organization. As Park conceived of the matter, modern societies?with their centers in multi-racial and multi-ethnic cities ?are characterized by "changes of for? tune [that] are likely to be sudden and dramatic," by an "atomization" in which "every individual is more or less on his own," by "[s]ocial forms [that] are flexible and in no sense fixed," and by a polis in which "[fjashion and public opinion take the place of custom as a means and method of social control."4 These modern "mobile societies," as Park called them, have an inex? orable tendency to attract to themselves the still tradition-oriented peoples and, in the event, to convert them from their custom-bound ways of life into civic-minded citizens of a new Occidental socio-economic order. That