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

by Elie Mystal

Not even for a day just to see how it would feel. They’ve never been anything more than a cruel tease. Most of our written principles serve only as a mocking illustration that the white people running this place know the right thing to do but simply refuse, out of spite, to do it. The Constitution is the impassive villain pouring a bottle of water into the ground in front of you as you’re driven mad by thirst. And so I have written this book. My goal is to expose what the Constitution looks like from the vantage of a person it was designed to ignore. My goal is to illustrate how the interpretation of the Constitution that conservatives want people to accept is little more than an intellectual front for continued white male hegemony. And my goal is to help people understand the key role the courts play in interpreting the Constitution