Contemporary Segregation in the South

While America on the international scale prides itself as being the melting pot of modern civilization, there are still prevailing attitudes of racial discrimination among the population. Though modern laws and safeguards are in place to stop blatant racial discrimination America, the southern regions in particular, still maintain a standard of unspoken racial segregation. The general mindset of the southern population is that while "politicians can legislate what I do, they can't tell me what to think." This frame of mind is what allows the actualities of racial discrimination and segregation to continue.

America as a whole has made tremendous strides towards racial equality. Legislation introduced to prevent outright racial segregation in public have been instituted and enforced for decades now. Albeit slowly and with much difficulty at first. But unfortunately, laws cannot change the tradition of how people think. Open segregation, once common place in the south, has been replaced with the unspoken but widely understood idea that people "know" what they can do and where they can go and where they can't. The introduction of legal measures to protect individual freedoms of minorities has replaced open segregation with "traditional" segregation. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in the lower economic classes.