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

by Elie Mystal

Video gamers would call the Bill of Rights a “day one patch,”

The Constitution is not gospel, it’s not magic, and it’s not even particularly successful if you count one civil war, one massive minority uprising for justice that kind of worked against tons that have been largely rebuffed, and one failed coup led by the actual president, as “demerits.”

White people got so pissed off at that they replaced Barack Obama with a bigoted con man who questioned whether the Black president was even born in this country, and when their guy lost the next election, his people tried to start a coup.

hatred is a pretty big reason I’ve written this book.

I treat the law as an argument. People are told that the law is an “objective” thing, almost like it’s a form of physics.

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.

These people can say whatever they want, but the Constitution does not protect their right to employment.

Constitutional protections of speech are mainly concerned with the government’s attempts to silence or punish views the ruling party doesn’t like.

In short, the First Amendment cares about the things Republicans do when they control the government.

The Gawker story angered Thiel. In response, Thiel determined to destroy Gawker. Not the reporter who outed him or the man who owned the publication, like a normal megalomaniacal billionaire. No, Thiel’s thirst for vengeance would only be satisfied by destroying the entire media conglomerate itself. Gawker owned a bunch of spinoff blogs, vertices that reported on industries as varied as video games and sports. All had to suffer because the main Gawker website offended Thiel.

“I can’t stop people from suing us, I can only stop them from winning.”

I’ve all but stopped writing about conservative individuals. I try to stick to conservative institutions and, occasionally, conservative politicians who would look bad and lose votes if they sued me.

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

The real cancel culture is the one practiced by conservatives. They are the ones leading the assault on the First Amendment and freedom of speech.

The First Amendment is being weaponized.

It took only twenty years for the RFRA to go from something that defended people who used drugs as part of religious ceremonies, to something that prevents women from accessing drugs for their own health.

If Republicans are for it, chances are there’s something about my law that can be weaponized against vulnerable communities,

It’s almost amazing that people so consistently discriminate against those few protected classes when there is such a wealth of human difference that is not protected for us to work with.

Refusing to do your job because the person paying you to do it has different beliefs than you is not a religious objection, it’s plain and simple bigotry.

the right wingers are in it for the bigotry and not the protection of private freedoms.

Free speech protects people with theocratic views, but it doesn’t give them the right to impose those views on things like the market economy and the health care system.

even “good” laws can be manipulated by bad people to perform evil.

We live in the most violent industrialized nation on earth because too many dudes can’t admit they still need a night-light.

slavers worried that the new Constitution put the power of raising militias with the federal government and not with the individual states. That would mean that the federal government, dominated by Northerners, could choose to not help the South should their population of oppressed humans demand freedom.

Instead the original purpose was a practical concern that the antislavery North would leave the South vulnerable to slave revolts.

Until you can convince Republicans that shooting Black people is not okay, we will get nowhere.

Terry v. Ohio was the first Supreme Court case in history argued by two Black attorneys.

Racial profiling is the inevitable result of the degradation of Fourth Amendment protections.

being Black is not a constitutionally valid reason to suspect a person of crime.)

Instead of reasonable suspicion, cops act on their unreasonable implicit (and often explicit) biases. That’s why arguably constitutional stop and frisks became nothing more than a Trojan horse for the unconstitutional scheme of racial profiling.

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.

“The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”

The Constitution reserves the police power to the states, which means that the federal government does not have broad authority to hold police accountable for acts of violence.

federalism (which is the term indicating that most of the legal power in this country rests with states)

I favor a straight-up objective standard for cops. Their actions should be reasonable with 20/20 hindsight.

But the idea that a cop who kills or attacks somebody should walk away without punishment because other cops are just as violent and depraved is not a constitutional principle I accept.

Bringing the police to heel will require us to stop letting them substitute their judgment for our constitutional protections.

white people who kill Black people are 250 percent more likely to have their homicides ruled as “justified” than when white people kill other white people.

In stand your ground states, that number jumps to 354 percent—it is 354 percent more likely that white people will be ruled as justified in their killings of Black people.*

“Self-defense” is how white people get away with murder. It is a textbook example of a “race-neutral” concept that has been applied wit...

The universe in which the cops can break into a woman’s apartment and shoot her dead, but her boyfriend cannot fire back at the armed, unknown assailants who killed her, is deeply fucked.

Courts have turned qualified immunity into a license for cops to act on their racial prejudices with impunity. Qualified immunity cases come down to whether state agents “violate[d] clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

I’ll take my mansion up front, thank you very much.

The way to fix the police was written into our Constitution before there were even police in need of fixing.

Why should one’s Fifth Amendment protections change based on how susceptible a person is to government coercion? Are

the strength of your Fifth Amendment protections depends on your level of legal education or exposure to the law.

Your constitutional rights aren’t supposed to change depending on whether you know they exist.

Aside from its unnecessarily limited scope, Miranda actually gives law enforcement a pathway to violate rights.

when police and prosecutors hone in on the wrong people, when they coerce false confessions, they allow actual criminals to go free and commit additional crimes.