Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

What really concerns liberals is that the ruling could make it more difficult for them to use the Voting Rights Act to guarantee certain election results. As Roger Clegg and Joshua Thompson, who filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, explained, “the principal use that federal civil-rights officials now make of Section 5 is to require racially gerrymandered and racially segregated voting districts.” The argument is that racial minorities are entitled to a proportionate number of voting districts in which they are the majority. “Think about how far from the ideals of the civil-rights movement the Left’s definition of civil rights has led us,” wrote Clegg and Thompson. “Universities must be able to discriminate against students on the basis of skin color, and voters must be required to vote only among those of their own kind.”29