I invite you to take yourself back a few years and imagine
you’re a senior in high school. Senioritis has kicked in, and
your once-a-week route to class via Denny’s Diner has become
a five-times-a-week routine. The long-awaited month of May has
finally arrived, and you know that can mean only one, great thing:
Senior Prom. While your mind may be nervously racing with thoughts
about who to go with, what to wear and which after-party will be
the wildest, you have naively overlooked one hugely consequential
fact: You’re not invited.
Why not, you ask? No, it’s not because you have
outstanding library fines. Bluntly put, you were not invited to
your senior prom for the sole fact that your skin is black and not
white.
Clueless to the notion that scenarios such as this one still go
on, I was shocked and appalled to discover that the above situation
really did occur three weekends ago in Wrightsville, Ga., where
parents paid to throw a private, all-white prom for their children
attending Johnson County High School.
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro’s Los Angeles Times’ column on
the incident, “Separate Proms ““ and Racism ““
Linger in Parts of the South” (May 14), stated that parents
held the event “in hopes of perpetuating a dying Southern
tradition.”
Dying Southern tradition?
Last time I checked, Brown won against the Board of Education of
Topeka, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation and
restrictions based on race or color were violations of the 14th
Amendment’s equal protection clause. That
“tradition” should have been dead 49 years ago.
Despite this 1954 ruling, integration has obviously failed to
materialize completely in some small Southern towns. According to
the column, the first integrated prom held in decades at Taylor
County High School ““ which neighbors Johnson County ““
occurred merely one year ago. While integration is better late than
never, it is very disheartening to learn that Taylor County High
School’s tardy, yet bold move was not publically accepted
““ especially considering how many students again decided to
hold another segregated prom this year.
This is not an isolated occurrence. In order to bypass
desegregation laws, some Georgia high schools chose to stop holding
proms altogether and decided to let the children’s parents
privately organize their own. Because parents and not schools are
throwing these whites-only proms, no laws are being broken, and,
therefore, authorities are unable to interfere.
High school kids have extremely impressionable minds ““
these parents are not perpetuating anything other than flat out
racism.
While the decision to end school-sponsored proms is legal, the
parents’ actions are more than disappointing. And though
their privately held proms could be considered as harmless as
having a party that not everyone is invited to, the focus of this
“party” was not the inclusion of particular seniors on
the guest list, but the exclusion of an entire group of
seniors.
I naively thought these days the word “segregated”
had become an archaic term. But, sadly, I was proven wrong when I
read that some Georgia high schools still elect separate black and
white student body presidents, and some still have two senior trips
““ one for blacks and one for whites.
I’m no lawyer, but these acts seem to be more in
compliance with the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896 ““ which
created the separate-but-equal doctrine ““ than the updated
Brown v. Board ruling. Come on Georgia, are you really that
outdated? Or, should the question be: Are you really that
racist?
Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the court’s opinion that
said segregating blacks “generates a feeling of inferiority
as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts
and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”
Holding separate events for blacks and whites has no purpose but
to lower the blacks’ social status, and should definitely
have no place in the Georgia school system. I am embarrassed and
ashamed that almost 50 years after the Brown v. Board ruling,
practices like the ones in Georgia are still continuing today.
I now invite you not to imagine your senior prom, but to hope
that for future generations segregation will no longer be a part of
schools, government or, for that matter, social lives.
Daily Bruin Columnist Maytal Nissim is a second-year American
literature and culture student. E-mail her at
[email protected].