Just days after a Supreme Court ruling that Justice Elena Kagan said completed the majority's “demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” IPR economist and legal scholar Chika Okafor made the case that the decision rests on a flawed premise—that colorblind rules produce fair outcomes.
At his May 11 IPR colloquium, Okafor showed that even in a “utopian” world where all groups start on equal footing, minorities end up with fewer opportunities simply because their social group is smaller, and that disadvantage compounds at every stage of the political process. The new legal standard the ruling creates, he said, is nearly impossible to meet—a “lock without a key.”
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