NEWS: Blacks And Whites Actually Dance Near Each Other

what the fucking fuck?
ok i'm from texas and i've seen some pretty insidious racism, but this is a new one.

how easily we forget how backward some people still are. when i was a kid, my younger sister had a friend whose parents belonged to an elks lodge that had a highly coveted swimming pool, so my sister was often invited by her friend to go swim there. my sister's friend had a brother, whose BFF happened to be black, and he was not allowed into the pool (private club, y'all!). when this eventually got back to my parents, my sister was forbidden from going there.

That school was in Virginia. And here's the shocker - it was primarily black students pushing for the segregated prom. I guess you could really say it was a push for one powerballad prom and one R&B prom, but (back then, at least) that was close enough to a black/white line for most people. Hell, I thought fistfights were going to break out over the vote for senior song being between "It's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday" and "Winds of change".

Chances are your neighborhoods were either black or white, in Louisiana, neighborhoods are typically mixed. The attitudes mainly being "I might not like em, but they're my neighbors", whereas, in Rochester, NY, it was " I like em, as long as they don't live in my neighborhood".

Ah ... that's not as bad as I imagined it was, then. But it still would have been nice if the school had helped the two cultures to find a way to enjoy their prom together.

Voluntary segregation is still a kind of segregation. Maybe it's not entirely as bad as forced segregation, but it still shares alot of it's negative consequences.

The thing is, if I want I can imagine a similar situation happening here. Like you say, it doesn't make it good, but it also doesn't paint quite the same picture of hate fueled intolerance. It's all in how the story in presented, given that we don't have the facts. What's the history there, why were the proms segregated originally, why did they remain that was for so long, and why did the students decide now to desebregate them. There are potentially many answers for all of those questions.

I have toured in every state in the country. In 1997 I was on a college tour of about 80 schools. By far I found the south to be more segregated and openly racist than anywhere else. Being from the west - and a very white subrurb of SF - I was astounded as what some of the people in the south said to me. My favorite - "It's my God given right to won black people." That was a gem.

The classic and often said, "They want to be seperate and so do we."

I remember being amazed everytime I walked into a southern college cafetria because the students segregated themselves. Very weird.

But comparing racism between the north and south is fucking retarded. You can find racists everywhere. The NYC PD comes to mind.

I think the worst feeling being in the south was when black men, who were older than me, would not look me in the eye and called me sir. Fucking weird and awful.

"I might not like em, but they're my neighbors"? That's the strongest argument you have?

I once got a $625 speeding ticket driving through Turner County on I-75. I knew there was something shady about the place.

Well, that's exactly it. I'm certainly not trying to suggest that racism isn't an issue in upstate NY, but "down right more racist"? I just don't think that's fair.

The Onion was on to these backwoods clowns years ago:

Georgia adds swastika, middle finger to state flag

November 4, 1998

Culture is not uibiquitous. I'm not surprised that this could happen. Saddened, but not surprised. I imagine it will take at least the period with which the cotton culture was with us for the concept of black vs. white racism to be completely abolished. Ridiculous.

This is a fake story because we all know white people can't dance.

i dunno.
granted, i didn't go and read the actual article; but from what FTR said, most of the kids that showed up were black, and the whites had their own private party. so i see it as 'a few' kids attempting to break down the barriers.
also, i was rasied in a strict devout roman catholic family. But i'm not roman catholic, and i never have been. So i think that while a lot of the problem does come from the way parents raise their kids, i don't think it's beyond them to change themselves.
I think their willingness to stay the same, without question, makes them backwards.

I grew up in southern Louisiana and I've never heard of a segregated prom. I lived in neighborhoods where there were mostly white, with a few black families and neighborhoods that were mostly black, with a few white families and some that were just mixed. The few schools I went to were almost evenly mixed. I've never known of a school or neighborhood that was all white or all black... Well, I've heard, but it was never the completely true.

I imagine in northern Louisiana, it may be different. I still wouldn't expect segregated anything in schools.

I wonder whether there isn't really a fairly significant amount of de facto and/or voluntary segregation going on that just kind of flies under the radar. I went to a large mid-city high school (Central in St. Paul, for you Minnesotan readers). We had over 2000 students, and I'd guess at least 800-900 of them were black. More than any other single ethnic block, at any rate. We had two main levels of classes, regular and advanced/college classes. Except for electives, gym, and health (none of which came in the advanced variety), I took entirely advanced level classes.

I don't think I ever had an advanced class alongside a black student. One or two at the very most. Over 4 years. In a majority-black school. That's one thing.

The other is the lunchroom seating was *always* voluntarily segregated. You had several big long tables of black kids there, another few of Asian kids there, white kids over there... I mean, don't get me wrong, there were a few isolated multiracial groups here and there, but not many.

End result was I didn't know pretty much any non-white fellow students except people who'd also gone to my grade school.

Can't speak to what prom was like, though. Didn't go.

I LOL'd because it's painfully true.

-TM