all-in-one-wp-security-and-firewall domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/wp_mjgj8c/racefiles.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114In the wake of last week\u2019s Supreme Court rulings in the Fisher <\/em><\/a>affirmative action case and the Shelby County<\/em><\/a> <\/em>Voting Rights Act case, the post-mortems are in.<\/p>\n Race-based affirmative action in higher education is on its deathbed<\/a>. Anti-discrimination protections for many voters are imperiled<\/a>.<\/p>\n For the Court\u2019s majority, two of the proudest achievements of the long Civil Rights Movement have become burdensome and outmoded, like a payphone on a troubled street corner. Even in liberal policy circles, the shibboleth of \u201cclass over race\u201d<\/a> (as if they were mutually exclusive) seems quickly becoming the new common sense.<\/p>\n At their birth, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the adoption of race-based affirmative action at colleges and universities challenged foundational and broadly held assumptions of white supremacy and offered alternative visions of freedom and human possibility.<\/p>\n Restrictions on voting\u2014dating back to the nation\u2019s founding–were rooted in the assumption that fitness for democracy could not be made universal; all people did not have an inherent capacity to govern themselves. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, at its most transformative, imagined democracy as much more inherent to the human condition than the Founding Fathers ever did.<\/p>\n Similarly, discrimination in higher education\u2014on the basis of race, class, and gender\u2014has been predicated on the claim that intellectual capacity is not uniformly distributed. At their best, social movements to challenge educational segregation and exclusion operated from much more expansive visions of human intellectual possibility.<\/p>\n Those ideas–the assumption that human capacities for freedom and intelligence are not universal–flourish in our country today. They have justified the effort to disenfranchise nearly six million voters because of past felony convictions<\/a>. They animate the belief that harsh voter identification laws<\/a> and policies that criminalize common voter registration practices<\/a> must be adopted in the name of \u201cdefending democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n