Do equity protections for non voting shares exist

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Can a PE firm just buy a majority of the voting shares in order to carve out the profitable portions of the business it wants to take private and sell to itself?

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Probably not. A controlling shareholder generally has a fiduciary duty to minority shareholders, and must take the company’s interest and the minority shareholder interests in account. If the controlling shareholder is on both sides of a transaction as you described, this might be a breach of the fiduciary duty of loyalty for self dealing. A lot of factors come in to play in the entire analysis. A caveat to this—if the minority shareholders also share in the benefit of the deal, then self dealing may not be found.