OT: Why does Georgia still have segregated proms?

Segregation of "races" came from another attempt to maintain the elites' dominance through a monistic ideology. Those Western thinkers who replaced natural laws of a deist God for religious authority maintained this ideology by subsuming the sensual realm to these "laws." To maintain a sense of "perfection," they had to rationalize every observable injustice. I found an interesting article that traces this process. In the 19th Century, American anthropology and social Darwinism provided the rationalization many people, especially racists, still use for these injustices – anyone suffering was “unfit” for the struggle of survival, and any attempt to limit the power of the wealthy to help citizens (thereby allowing the “unfit” to live and reproduce,) interfered with the “natural order of things.” Herbert Spencer, the leading proponent of this view, saw the State as “nothing more than a large partnership,” and the contract as “the supreme mechanism for maintaining social order with the absolute minimum of compulsion and coercion.”


For those that could not conceivably be blamed in terms of failing to meet the demands of a contract, a different tactic was needed. The “otherness” that subjects of western culture had been sensitized to provided the key. The book, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954, describes how American Anthropologists published work (such as the popular book of the day Types of Mankind) to convince their countrymen that this “otherness” put those whose land we stole and those whom we had enslaved into different “races” from us, ones demonstrably “inferior” to our own. Along with the strategies I outlined in the Homosexuality thread, the stereotypes that such work promoted continue to foster the racism that motivates this segregation.