and Whites were not discriminatory. In fact, they were necessary to cater to the
different needs of the races and ensure racial harmony. There were separate neigh-
borhoods, separate businesses, separate sections on buses and in restaurants, sepa-
rate schools and colleges, even separate washrooms and drinking fountains. In
mainstream (that is, White) movies, Blacks appeared only as servants and entertain-
ers, but in their own “separate but equal” movies, they played rugged action heroes,
mystery sleuths, romantic leads, every imaginable role.
Usually, however, the “separate” meant “inferior.” Black schools received only
a fraction of the resources of White schools. The Black section of the bus was at the
back. The Black section of the restaurant was in the kitchen.
In the case of the system of apartheid, that inferiority was institutionalized and
legal.Apartheidmeans “separation” (think: apart-ness), and it was a system that man-
dated segregation of different racial groups. In South Africa, apartheid was a politi-
cal system institutionalized by the White minority in 1948, and all social life was
determined by whether you were one of four races: White, black, “coloured” (mixed
race), or Indian (South Asian). There were separate schools, restaurants, hospitals,
churches, drinking fountains—and even separate buses and bus stops. Apartheid
remained in effect until 1990, when Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African
National Congress, was freed from prison and soon elected president of South Africa.
In 1954, the Supreme Court heard the Brown vs. the Board of Educationcase
and reversed its decision, concluding that “separate but equal” was never equal. So
segregation was replaced by legal integration, physical intermingling of the races,
which presumably would lead to cultural intermingling and racial equality. Fifty years
later, integration has not been entirely achieved. We have integrated washrooms and
drinking fountains in the United States, but most people, especially poor Blacks and
DISCRIMINATION 255One way to find
out whether our
society has
made racial
progress is to track racial attitudes over
time. In the 1920s, sociologist Emory
Bogardus devised a social distance scale
to measure the extent to which we use
racial and ethnic categories in the
choices we make about our social life
(Bogardus, 1925, 1933). He asked a
national sample of college students,
aged 18 to 35 (about 10 percent of his
respondents were Black) a set of ques-
tions designed to measure their distance
from other groups. These included
whether you would make personal
friends with them, accept them as
neighbors on your street, work in the
same office, and date or marry someone
from that group. Bogardus predicted
that the social distance among groups
would decline.
Every 10 years, these questions have
been asked of a national sample, and the
students ranked their preferences among
30 different groups—mostly Europeans,
but also Black Americans, Canadians,
Japanese Americans, and various Asian
groups. There was some fluctuation over
this half-century of surveys. Blacks, for
example, moved up from the bottom to
the middle of the group. But generally
the rankings listed White Americans,Changing Racial Attitudes
How do we know
what we know
Canadians, Northern and Western
Europeans in the top third, South and
Central and Eastern Europeans in the
middle third, and racial minorities in the
bottom third. (Italians were the only
Southern European group to make the
top 10 eventually.) Americans were
surprisingly consistent.
In 2001, sociologists Vincent Parillo
and Christopher Donoghue updated
these categories and administered the
survey again to a large national sample
of college students. It was administered
in the 6 weeks following September 11.
Italians had jumped to second place,
even ahead of Canadians and the British,
and Blacks had cracked the top 10. The
last two categories now were filled by
Muslims and Arabs (Parillo and
Donoghue, 2005; Parillo, 2006).