Tuxes, gowns, flowers and limos mix with music, dancing and hangovers. Across the South, teenagers are proming this time of year. Something else is going on as well: old school segregation. George Wallace would be proud.
The election of Barack Obama began a dialog across America about a post-black country – so the story goes – that has moved past the old divides and ugly prejudices that tore us apart for 300 years. Yet, in the southern part of that conversation, quite a few rural schools still hold separate proms for black students and white students. Old habits die hard.
Recently Morgan Freeman offered to pay for the prom at a Charleston, Mississippi high school if the blacks and whites would hold one prom, together. The kids wanted to do it. White parents did not. That is the pattern.
I usually write humorous stories in this space. This is so far from a humorous subject for me as a Southerner, it fled past embarrassment years ago. We still look for reasons to justify ‘separate but equal,’ which was never either. We still look for ways to hate those who are different than we are. We still judge people by the color of their skin. Which is more ironic, Southern girls spending so much time in tanning beds or their parents spending so much time afraid of people who are the very color their daughters are trying to achieve.
No one wants to segregate sports, albeit, some are color coded in both directions. Students can learn biology and history together in the same class, but it appears we haven’t learned much from either biology or history. Hatred is learned, just like math and chemistry.
Differences in skin color, culture, music and dance styles hardly explain this carving up of children based on the opinions of parents who allow their children to do other things outside parental purveyance. These teenagers have more freedom than any generation in history. Parents seem to have no control over their teens smoking, drinking and premarital sex (or even interracial dating), but we draw the line when it comes to dancing with kids of a different color? Of all of the issues our country faces today – wars and terrorism, economic meltdown and staggering job losses, massive debt, health care and environmental issues, energy spasms and crime – having separate proms for black kids and white kids seems like straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel (to steal from Jesus).
When I was growing up in Montgomery, Alabama (during the Civil Rights movement), I thought that eventually we would find a way to dispense with the traditions of hatred that kept us from being the so-called Christians we claimed to be. Some have moved past this cultural gridlock. Some have not.
My high school in Andalusia, Alabama (a small town, to be sure) has never had a segregated prom in the 38 years since it was integrated – small proof that Southerners are not all still living in the 1950’s, but proof nevertheless. I was there when the black high school and white high school merged in 1971. Parents had a bigger issue with it then than the students. Perhaps parents could still learn a few things from their children.
?
