Migrant children changed white youth culture, inverting the assimilation narrative

Evidence

Here Hebdige claims we can view a dialogue of emulation and accommodation. This turned the debate about assimilation on its head. The children of migrants played a part in changing, albeit unevenly, the cultural nature of their generation and what it meant to grow up in a metropolitan environment. Hebdige claimed that the interaction between black and white youth was encoded in youth style and could be read as a kind of “phantom history of race relations.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2986

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: ‘phantom history of race relations’ — how style records what official histories omit; reverse-assimilation as a lens.
• FICTION: The ‘phantom history’ concept could seed a story told through the narrator’s clothing and soundtrack choices.
• XREF: connects to: Missionary magazines systematically socialized white children into racial uplift work. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 552