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

by Elie Mystal

Indeed, our definition of a “failed state” is one where the nominal ruling government no longer has a monopoly on violence. If a local group or gang can maraud across a region, taking what they want and killing who they will, and the state cannot stop them even if it wants to, then that state no longer deserves or is owed any allegiance from its people.

Equality and fairness must meet the standards of our modern definitions of those ideals, or else the entire American experiment is illegitimate.

“Where does it end?” asks the conservative jurist. What’s the point of winning the birth lottery if the government is just going to step in and level the playing field? Conservatives are always worried that protecting too many rights might one day lead to a society that’s fundamentally fair.

If we’re going to talk about the constitutional right to an abortion, we’re going to talk about it from first principles. And the first principle that the people who wrote the Constitution missed is that women are people. Full, equal, people. If you believe that, and I know a lot of men don’t, but if you believe that women are people, then the right to privacy and all the reproductive rights that flow from it is a fairly straightforward thing.

So let me say once again, for the people in the back: I do not give one wet shit about the original intent of white folks. Their motives were horrible. Their intentions, barbaric. The public they allowed to have a voice well understood the horrible, barbaric meanings of their laws. And none of it should inform what rights we now have today, unless you are interested in bringing back the shitty, monstrous societies created by long dead white people.

The Thirteenth Amendment flatly prohibits forced labor, and it doesn’t have an exception for labor that white men won’t do themselves but think is really important for others to do for society.

The truth is that the expansion of the franchise has been resisted and undercut by the judicial branch and conservative politicians at nearly every turn. I take a dim view of our ability to amend the Constitution into a more perfect document, because I know too well what courts can do to a freaking amendment they don’t like.

Without commanding a single troop or passing a single bill, a conservative Supreme Court is not a check on the other branches of government, but a check on progress itself.