While the cultural critic remains suspicious of these terms and what they denominate,or create, such terms also seem inescapable in talking about the American cultural landscape. The quotations listed below are not designed to give final definition to these terms, but merely indicate the degree of complexity involved when attempting to speak about race and ethnicity in American cultural history.
Immigrants appear to pass through four phases in the course of being Americanized.
In the first phase they exhibit economic eagerness, the greed of the unfed. Once the proletarian level of such independence is reached, the process of assimilation slows down and tends to come to a stop. The immigrant group is still a national group, modified, sometimes improved, by environmental influenes, but otherwise a solitary spiritual unit, which is seeking to find its way out on its own social level. This search brings to light permanent group distinctions, and the immigrant, like the Anglo-Saxon American, is thrown back upon himself and his ancestry. Then a process of dissimilation begins.