Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

by Elie Mystal

the law is a collection of subjective decisions we—well, white people—have made over the years to protect people and activities they like, and to punish people and activities they don’t like. The law can be applied objectively, though it isn’t most of the time. But the notion that the law is a mathematical equation that can be fed into a supercomputer to produce “justice” is a total fallacy.

Trolling the Athenian Illuminati is not what got Socrates a death sentence, however. Socrates’s sophistry was mainly a front for antidemocratic, authoritarian views. He believed that only reasonable, logical, and competent people should be in charge. He believed that men of merit should be elevated into positions of power. The problem, which is more obvious to our modern eyes than it has been in decades, is that the idea of a meritocracy is almost in direct conflict with the idea of a democracy. Democracies tend to elevate any person with enough wealth and charisma to stand out in a crowd. Democracies neither necessarily nor naturally reward merit. Nor do they punish incompetence.

Wealthy white businesspeople suing my employer because I notice their bullcrap is now an ever-present threat to my livelihood.

ammosexual is the scientific categorization for a person who fetishizes firearms and can’t win at Scrabble)

The original public purpose for a citizens’ militia was not some theoretical worry about standing armies or an idealized right of citizens’ militias to resist federal power. Instead the original purpose was a practical concern that the antislavery North would leave the South vulnerable to slave revolts. Scalia omits that rationale.

The police have a license to kill Black people, as long as police argue that they were so afraid they wet themselves. Police are the only people whose own cowardice and hysteria can be used to justify an objective misreading of the facts.

I’m often surprised by how much faith people place in juries as a check on arbitrary, despotic uses of state power. I mean, do people just not know how arbitrarily despotic juries can be? I cannot reliably get a random sampling of twelve people to read a whole article before calling me an asshole based on my headline.

I’ve had white people tell me with a straight face that I’m not even allowed to judge whether a white person has been racist to me personally. Like I’m the one who is too “biased” to adjudicate the situation impartially. If I could have one white superpower, it would be the fucking nerve of these people.

And sometimes, when they point out that a current decision cannot be squared with a past ruling, I let them win. I’ve been talked into letting them stay up for an extra hour so many times that my eldest treats “bedtime” as the start of negotiations, not the end of his day.

The man was apparently revolted by the “vice” he witnessed in New York City—especially advertisements announcing the availability of contraceptives—and made it his mission functionally to destroy everybody’s good time. I just don’t get these people like Comstock, who we see again and again throughout human history. I don’t understand these people who look at two consenting adults fucking and think, “Oh no, something must be done about this!” Who are these people, and how are there always so many of them?

Armed with the pill, a woman has just as much physical power to veto reproduction as a man. That’s why Griswold and Buxton were arrested after just ten days. It’s not because they were handing out contraceptives; it’s because they were handing out equality.

Whether my congressional representative looks more like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Jay Gatsby has little to do with where I live, and more to do with whether I’m districted with people who live five minutes south of my house, or five minutes north.

The compromise provided that one chamber of the legislature, the House of Representatives, would be apportioned based on population, while the other, the Senate, would give equal representation to each state. To put it another way: white slavers feared “democracy” so much that they wrote it out of the Constitution.

Madison put the Ninth Amendment in to counteract what he knew small-minded people would do to the rest of the document, and so small-minded conservatives have to pretend it’s not even there in order to achieve their goals of retarding progress.