the.com/segregation
Segregation enforced inequality by law and custom, denying people dignity and equal access to shared life.
means The enforced separation of groups of people, usually by race, in daily life, space, or institutions — often backed by law or custom and designed to keep power unevenly distributed.
from From Latin segregare, 'to separate from the flock' — se- ('apart') plus grex, gregis ('flock, herd'). The same root gives us 'gregarious' and 'congregation,' so the word's bones literally mean herding some sheep off from the others. It entered English in the 1500s meaning simple separation, but took on its grim, specific weight in the 19th and 20th centuries as a legal and social term for racial division, most infamously in U.S. Jim Crow laws and South African apartheid — the word's dictionary innocence standing in stark contrast to the systems it came to name.
- legal end
- Brown v. Board, 1954, on paper only
- de facto version
- redlining kept cities segregated without a single sign
- global cousin
- apartheid ran South Africa until 1994
- enforcement tool
- Jim Crow laws lasted nearly a century