Allow Me to Retort

I've only been following the author's interviews and social media for a couple of years now but he has always impressed me with his wit as well as knowledge. So when I saw this book on netgalley, I had to get the advance copy immediately. And I'm so glad I did.

As an outsider who has only lived in America for about a decade, anything I know about it's constitution, politics or law is recently learnt, mostly through books or TV. But I have to say, I've never read anything law related that is so accessible to common public like this book before. Elie uses his usual humor and candidness to elaborate not just how each of the amendments in the constitution should be interpreted and what their original intents might have been, he also elucidates the various ways in which conservatives and white supremacists and racists have misinterpreted and misused the same amendments and laws to get what they want, discriminate who they want to without fear, cement racism and police brutality against Black people as the norm of the land, and continue to dilute the effectiveness of any constructive law left right now with the help of their conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He is absolutely right when he says that any law even when passed in good faith can and will be misused because a significant population of the country have been made to believe that they can only survive if they can discriminate against all marginalized groups with impunity and enforce their fake morality on everybody.

The book does present a bleak picture. Despite whatever progress has been made over the decades, its seems obvious these days that things are not going in the right direction anymore. And that helplessness and anger does reflect in the author's writing. He doesn't mince his words when he questions even the moral standing of a constitution written by a “collection of slavers and colonizers”. And he understands that they were great men of their times, but it doesn't mean that we cling to an eighteenth century racist, sexist and bigoted originalist reading of the document. He clearly believes that an honest interpretation of the constitution and its rightful enforcement can still bring about a progressive change to the country, but whether that is a possibility or a pipe dream is something we all have to wait to see.

In the meantime, if you know someone who uses some magical words from the constitution to justify their bigoted and discriminatory beliefs, do use the points made in this book to question them right back and challenge their worldview.

An inflamed cri de coeur about the ways the US has been fucked from the beginning. Pardon my French, ho ho.

But srs. Elie Mystal is a legal scholar and plain Englishifier of the law, akin to (wonderful) Emily Bazelon. I felt like I was attending an undergrad course on US law and history, as taught by the most charismatic prof on campus. This was a fun romp (!?) about white supremacy, as embedded in the Constitution. What I appreciated deeply is Mystal's central thesis: so-called “Originalists” - i.e. lawyers and judges like Antonin Scalia who purport to divine the Constitutional authors' “original intent” when writing the document, in order to apply that intent to our modern legal issues - ignore one central (AND OBVIOUS) problem: that the original Constitutional authors were....... uhh, 18th century slave-holding white men who didn't consider women or non-white people PEOPLE?? So maybe it doesn't matter at all what they “intended” and we should happily trash that?

That's the start and end of the book. And I am HERE. FOR. IT. The middle is a deep dive into each of the Constitutional amendments, and why they are, basically, imperfect bandaids applied to the original document in an effort to keep guiding it back to its nobler ideals. Also: in the face of changing times! E.g. maybe enslaving a big portion of the population is a bad idea? Maybe women could have the right to vote too?

I really loved and appreciated Mystal's deep dives here, because I learned a lot and feel - as he promised - way more empowered to just be like “nope, that's stupid” when a right-wing originalist argument is made. I think treating these founding documents with irreverence and a critical eye is, indeed, VERY HEALTHY, and the cultural practice of worshipping them is weird and a shield for racism. Much like how when I meet a libertarian, I'm like, “but haz you heard of externalities and market design????? Because that comes up in econ 102...”