Schools in the southern U.S. may have been desegregated forty years ago, but in many places there are still separate high school proms for black and white students. According to Sara Corbett in a New York Times article, it’s driven primarily by the parents rather than by the kids themselves.
“It’s awkward,” acknowledges JonPaul Edge, a senior who is white. “I have as many black friends as I do white friends. We do everything else together. We hang out. We play sports together. We go to class together. I don’t think anybody at our school is racist.” Trying to explain the continued existence of segregated proms, Edge falls back on the same reasoning offered by a number of white students and their parents. “It’s how it’s always been,” he says. “It’s just a tradition.” – Corbett (2009)
A quick run through the Survey Documentation and Analysis website produced this interesting graph that shows one aspect of the slow, generational change in racial attitudes.
