According to this CNN article and this ABC News article, Turner County High School in Ashburn, Georgia, had its first integrated prom this past weekend. In the town of about 4,400 people, fifty-five percent are black and the other forty-five percent are white. In the past, parents held private, segregated proms: a black prom and a white prom.
If the idea of segregated proms in the 21st century isn’t puzzling enough, Mindy Bryan, who attended a segregated prom in 2001, had this to say: "The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It’s nothing racial at all." How does she say this with a straight face?
I didn’t know what to think when I first saw the story on CNN. After having read it over a couple of times, I’m still not sure what to think. How was this community able to continue to have segregated proms, and not have an official school prom until this year? What do you think of all this?
I think that as long as people were not excluded from either prom based on race I don’t really care. The thing that people often forget about race is that sometimes the natural social structure happens to line up with it, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. So long as Also, these Proms were privately hosted, making them essentially a private party. I’m sure there are plenty of private parties held across the country that happen to be one race only. I’m neither offended nor surprised by this, given the circumstances of it not being school sponsored.