In her post on the segregated proms in Charleston, Mississippi, Amanda has forgotten to include one key point, a glaring omission, really.
Whenever one brings up an example of institutional and personal racism in the American south, it's necessary to point out that the North is really racist. Really, really racist. I've been told many times, by friends and family, that it's the American North which really has the race problem.
So when pointing out that it's not just Charleston, Mississippi that has segregated proms(reg. req.), but the surrounding counties as well as high schools in Georgia and Louisiana, it's also necessary to mention that Northern states are really racist.
I haven't been able to find one example of a segregated high school prom anywhere outside the old Confederacy. But I'm confident that there must be scores, perhaps hundreds, of them. Because, as has been said over and over and over and over and fucking over, "racism is much worse in the North than the south."
And it must be true, because the only alternative is that the racist fucknuts of the American south - which happens to hold most of the racist fucknuts in the entire country and makes sure that they're still able to run things no matter how bad they make it for everybody - are also a bunch of whiners living in culture of victimization and resentment. They'd also have to be caught in a terrible cycle of self-hatred, since they're engaging in clearly racist behavior, but obviously know that it's wrong since none of them are capable of admitting it publicly.
Some people might say that the region which started the Civil War because their efforts to force legal slavery upon the rest of the nation failed, which brought us Jim Crow, which has brought us constant legal and illegal fights against every single effort ever made to bring about equality before the law, that flies the flag of a band of murderous traitors, that has monuments to those who betrayed the very nation of which we are all a part, the region that still fights for the "right" to have segregated high school dances, that this region is clearly the seat of racism in America, whatever problems the other regions of the country might have.
Some people might say that, but I won't, because I've been trained by white southerners to believe that real racism, like the responsibility for the Civil War, lies north of the Mason-Dixon.
