Final answer:
The phrase 'blueprint for a complete economic and political segregation' describes a policy designed to entirely separate groups based on race, impacting all facets of life, as exemplified by apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow laws in the U.S. De jure segregation is legally enforced segregation, while de facto segregation occurs due to non-legal factors, both of which have persistent effects on society.
Step-by-step explanation:
The statement 'blueprint for a complete economic and political segregation' refers to a systematically designed policy that ensures the total separation and isolation of groups based on race or ethnicity, affecting all aspects of their social, economic, and political lives. One of the most infamous instances of such a policy is the apartheid system in South Africa which, from 1948 to 1994, legally enforced the segregation of Black South Africans, stripping them of their rights and mandating their physical separation from White South Africans in virtually all areas of life. In the United States, similar policies were manifested through Jim Crow laws, which were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. The U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson upheld these segregation policies, establishing the 'separate but equal' doctrine, which posited that racially separate facilities, if equal in quality, did not violate constitutional rights.
While de jure segregation refers to segregation legally enforced by law, de facto segregation occurs without legal enforcement but rather due to social and economic factors. Despite the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional, segregation persisted, requiring further government and military intervention and new legislations such as the Civil Rights Act to combat it. Consequently, the spatial and social separation of racial groups remains an issue, with indices such as the segregation index measuring the extent of residential segregation among racial and ethnic groups and highlighting the ongoing challenges of segregation in society.