"Seperate but Equal" An ideal thrown to the wayside

           To start off this post I'm going to come out and say how I feel personally; segregation is alive and well in current day America. Now I'm a  bit of a history buff and knew about the case Brown Vs. The Board of Education before it was mentioned on the Professor's blog. While it was a win in the ever changing struggle for equality it was a very slight one. While education systems agreed upon an equal opportunity for all races there was still a divide in the school systems themselves over the years. Segregation is alive due to economic constraints rather than just race now. Rather than segregation through race and education being affected by that it is now affected by who can afford a private school for their children. The people who can afford these private schools can expect their children to receive a better education than those in public schools. This also has implications on where they can apply to college, because it is no secret that colleges will always look to those in private schools before those in public schools if the grades are similar. It's just a sense of superiority due to something the student themselves can't control; their family's economic situation. This is eerily similar to the very thing that was fought for in the case of Brown Vs. The Board of Education, equal opportunity for every student. How can a student be responsible for their parents' living situation anymore than they can be responsible for what they are as a human being? It's just as simple as that students are still being punished for things they can't control almost 60 years after the fact.
        Speaking of things taking awhile to advance Barack Obama was the first African American to be elected president after over 200 years of the country being independent from Britain. Now I'm not going to get into a political debate on how I think Obama is doing with the country because that is not the basis of my argument at all. What I am arguing would be the longevity of just white males being elected in this time period. If equality was achieved in 1954 in the education system then perhaps it wouldn't have been a stretch to believe that maybe even in 30 years someone other than a white male would have been thought of as a presidential candidate. Well as history has shown us that wasn't the case. There is even still a racism with Obama being elected president according to author Tim Wise because their is the idea of Barack Obama being considered at times to be "Outside the black and brown norm" To also paraphrase Tim Wise, he basically says "Thinking that America will go into a post-racial point would be just as absurd to think that Pakistan is any less of a sexist community because of their elected official in the 80's". Much like the education system there is still blockades to actual advancements because of the ideals that people are different, and in a sense, still segregated.
       The separate but equal phrase held no water ever because to imply that something is different means that they aren't equal. If a difference has to be distinguished then the ideal of equality is a falsehood in that scenario. I just personally feel that we aren't moving fast enough as a society in the right direction. Not speaking morally of course because that's an entirely different thing and an argument for another day, but in the argument of equality of education in the country it's still just too slow. While one problem is slowly being fixed another one arises. There needs to be a sense of equality from student to student, and one should not be seen as superior over the other because they went to a "special school".