PLEASE HELP PLEASE How did this interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment allow the states to maintain segregation laws? Passage:

…The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but...it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality... Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation... do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.