Segregation

The separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group by enforced or voluntary residence in a restricted area, by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or by other discriminatory means (www.m-w.com). This is the textbook definition for segregation. But in society the concept of the word goes far deeper than this definition.

From the 1800's to 1950's, society was controlled by what was called Jim Crow laws. The term Jim Crow originated in a song performed by Daddy Rice, a white minstrel show entertainer in the 1830s. Rice covered his face with charcoal paste or burnt cork to resemble a black man, and then sang and danced a routine in caricature of a silly black person. By the 1850s, this Jim Crow character, one of several stereotypical images of black inferiority in the nation's popular culture, was a standard act in the minstrel shows of the day.

How it became a term synonymous with the brutal segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans in the late nineteenth-century is unclear. What is clear, however, is that by 1900, the term was generally identified with those racist laws and actions that deprived African Americans of their civil rights by defining blacks as inferior to whites, as members of a caste of subordinate people.

The Supreme Court's sanctioning of segregation (by upholding the "separate but equal" language in state laws) in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 and the refusal of the federal government to enact anti-lynching laws meant that black Americans were left to their own devices for surviving Jim Crow (http://campus.northpark.edu). In most cases, southern blacks tried to avoid engaging whites as much as possible as the best means of evading their anger. These efforts at separating themselves from whites meant developing their own schools and community-based support groups as much as possible.

In the 1860s and early 1870s, many southern blacks actually preferred segregated schools, especially their all-black colleges, as a means of local self-government and independence--even though they had little choice in the matter after 1890. Many of these colleges became the primary centers of black resistance to Jim Crow, although their administrators and staff frequently differed over how best to make their stand. At the primary and secondary school levels, truly heroic efforts were made by impoverished black teachers to educate their pupils, usually in face of white resistance that often included violence. Whites were generally so opposed to black education that many states in the South refused to build black public high schools until the twentieth-century.

Now segregation is legally gone. But is that true? Yes, African Americans are no longer made to sit in the back of the bus, or attend separate schools or churches than whites. But other forms or segregation have evolved. Now we have forms of sexual segregation which can be the belief that women are inferior to men. This is the case in most workplaces.

Women and men are treated extremely different from each other in the workplace. As everybody knows, men and women tend to hold different kinds of jobs. We increasingly view the existence of these differences as a major social problem, and we take for granted affirmative-action programs designed to reduce the differences--to get more women into jobs traditionally held by men, and vice versa.

The background thought of these programs is that men and women are segregated because of discrimination. The central assumptions are that employers force or pressure women to take less-skilled, lower-paying jobs. The concept that males and females dominate different occupations may not be surprising to many. Women are typically found to dominate occupations that require degrees in "education, English, fine arts, foreign languages, home economics, library and social work" and nursing. Men are

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