I'm not sure there are many areas of American politics than are better off now than they were 17 months ago, but one highly welcome improvement has been our move away from race-conscious public policies, about which some observations:

With the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais we may have finally done away with the scourge of racial gerrymandering. It is possible that there has been no political practice in recent decades that contained within it more blatantly racist assumptions, including that Black folks can only be properly represented by other Black folks, that white elected officials don't care about Black constituents, that race-based voting is both inevitable and desirable, that people with the same skin color think the same way, etc.

The idea of segregating Black and white voters and artificially squeezing as many of the former into Black majority congressional districts, is, as Justice Samuel Alito put it in his opinion for the court majority, "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."

All public policy should be scrupulously colorblind, and the fact that it hasn't been in the past is all the more reason for it to be now and in the future. Treating people of different color differently is directly contrary to the letter and intent of the 14th Amendment.

In a practical........

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