The Mississippi middle school where blacks & whites are segregated & the the Principal is black?

Oddest news story of the week.

Curious I go to the school’s website where i am greeted with a fairly integrated administrative crew heard by a black principal. Not sure what to make of this. I could see it just being super old info but the dates are current and the claim is that the daughter was told these policies are still in place and in force. There’s got to be more to this story. How can this be the first time they’ve gotten aheads up on this? No one can be that retarded in 2010.

I’ll bet you that the rules were put in place years ago to ensure that black kids were equally represented.

When I was in a public high school in 1970s Mississippi, we had two separate homecoming courts for black and white students. We also weren’t allowed to have school-sanctioned dances, only the Prom. I guess they were afraid we might have actually danced together!

Maybe they moved really fast, but:

It sounds to me like they just kept it going until someone complained.

Good for them for ending it, should have happened a long time ago.

You’d think after all that flap about the lesbian girl and the prom, that schools & school districts would have scoured their policies and procedures to make sure that nothing like this remained.

They didn’t say lesbians couldn’t be class president, just blacks.

Duh.

Sounds like Lebanon’s Confessionalist system. Obviously they’re trying to stave off a civil war. Do Hispanic kids get to be hall monitors?

Actually, I’ve heard they can be quite good as class presidents, because they have so much practice reading speeches aloud and memorizing lines from plays.

It’s simply stunning. You think you live in reasonably well informed world. The net is out there and info is available for everyone, and yet you have (presumably) thousands and thousands of parents etc. from all walks of life looking at this information over the years and only ONE calls them out on it. Various scholastic leadership slots parceled out strictly by race. How long has it been since that was illegal?

I mean really… WTF! What kind of cuckoo land do these people live in. What’s the minimum education required to be a Principal these days? Bachelors? Masters? How pig ignorant you have to be to be oblivious to the fact this is illegal?

I read about this today in “The Root.”

The reader comments after the article only served to confuse me further. Apparently this policy was set in place to ensure equal opportunity. Must have seemed like a good idea at the time. :rolleyes:

Of course, if they get an all-white or all-black class leadership roster in a grade next year someone will shit themselves about that, too.

I can easily imagine how these rules were created. There was probably a discussion among the administrators of the school like this:

“Isn’t it great that the school body is now integrated? Isn’t it great that the faculty is now integrated? Isn’t it great that the school sports teams and other extracurricular activities are now integrated?”

“Yeah, but the class presidents and other student-elected positions are still exclusively white.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the white students only vote for other white students and the black students only vote for other black students. Hey, we’re only slowly getting beyond the point that white students only sit with other white students and black students only sit with other black students at lunch. Since the school is two-thirds white, that means that the class officers are all white.”

“Hmm, well, maybe we can force them to elect a racially diverse set of class officers. We’ll say that some of the positions have to have a white in them and some have to have a black in them. We’ll let it alternate each years which race gets those positions.”

Something like this probably motivated these rules.

Except that my understanding is that the school’s population was predominantly black so if that is the case you have the races reversed in your post, Wendell.

Well there goes the idea that affirmative action isn’t racist.

This is so freakin’ crazy that I can hardly believe it. I mean, I DO believe it. But it’s just…so unbelievable. It. Just. Does. Not. Compute.

A predominately black school.

The student council is led by white kids.

The school’s paper is run by the black kids.

Then next year everyone switches roles?

And this has gone on for years without anyone complaining?

No white kid ever wanted to get on the paper during the “black” year?

No black kid ever wanted to be president during the “white” year"?

No one ever thought about what to do with the non-black and non-white kids? Or the biracial ones?

Wow. I thought I was desensitived to racial stupidity, but wonders never cease.

I suppose I’m just really spoiled. I grew up in fully integrated schools (as close to 50/50 as you can get in the city of Atlanta, GA) and we NEVER EVER had problems with diversity in student council or the school paper. In other groups, yes, but not those. I was elected to offices by white and black kids alike–and folks from both groups actually hated me! Now middle-school yearbook was a bit more white-biased because it was an elective, not something you volunteered for (which seems unfair, in retrospect), and for some reason there slightly more white kids in it than black. But even then, there were plenty of us black kids representing. I was copy editor and wore my press badge (along with student council badge and hall monitor pin) with much pride. (Yes, I was a nerd. But not an Urkel nerd. More like a Erica-Alexander-in-Deja Vu nerd. Yeah, that sounds about right crossing my fingers, hoping no one ever finds out the truth)

I didn’t like middle school. I would have really hated it, though, without all the extra curriculars. So that’s why I feel so bad for all the kids that have gone through this horrible policy for DECADES. Reparations. All of 'em should get them. That, or a re-do of their middle school years. Something to make them whole.

No, Tethered Kite, read the first link in the OP. The school is two-thirds white and one-third black.

Looks like 70.3% white for the school district.

which is pretty close to the population demographics for Nettleton (66.5% white).

Okay. I did a recheck and you are right. That’s what I get for believing random posters with an axe to grind. Mea culpa.

Which reflects the state as a whole, which is about 2/3rds white.

Let me just note that the title of this thread is wrong. The school is not segregated. Having some class officer positions be for whites and some for blacks (and regularly changing which position is for which race) may be a terrible idea, but the school is not segregated. The classes are not segregated by race. The faculty is not chosen by race. The extracurricular activities are not segregated by race. The term “segregation” has a meaning, and you can’t just apply it to any other situation, however bad an idea that situation is.