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A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution
by Elie Mystal
The MSNBC commentator and legal editor of the Nation turns his razor-sharp wit and legal acumen on our founding document and finds it to be...well, awfully white.
According to commentator and lawyer Elie Mystal, Republicans are wrong when they tell you the First Amendment allows religious fundamentalists to discriminate against gay people who like cake. They're wrong when they tell you the Second Amendment protects the right to own a private arsenal. They're wrong when they say the death penalty isn't cruel or unusual punishment, and they're wrong when they tell you we have no legal remedies for the scourge of police violence against people of color.
In fact, Mystal argues, Republicans are wrong about the law almost all of the time, and now, instead of talking about this on cable news, Mystal explains why in his first book.
Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument primer, offered so that people can tell the Republicans in their own lives why they are wrong. Mystal brings his trademark humor, snark, and legal expertise to topics as crucial to our politics as gerrymandering and voter suppression, and explains why legal concepts such as the right to privacy and substantive due process are constantly under attack from the very worst judges conservatives can pack onto the courts.
You don't need to be a legal scholar to grasp how stop-and-frisk is an unconstitutional policy of racial discrimination. You just need to read Mystal's book to understand that the Fourteenth Amendment once made the white supremacist policies adopted by the modern Republican Party illegal—and it can do so again if we let it.
"Mystal, an analyst at MSNBC and legal editor for the Nation, reads the Constitution from the point of view of a Black man keenly aware of the document's origins in a slaveholding nation...the author knows his constitutional law and history inside and out. There's something to learn on every page. A reading of the Constitution that all social justice advocates should study." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] pugnacious and entertaining critique of conservative interpretations of the Constitution...Buttressed by Mystal's caustic wit and accessible legal theories, this fiery takedown hits the mark." - Publishers Weekly
"After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don't understand—quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer..." - Michael Harriot, The Root
"Essential reading for people who think that you need to go to law school to understand our founding documents, and the perfect guidebook for Americans who want to understand how our country is supposed to work." - Zerlina Maxwell, MSNBC analyst and author of The End of White Politics
"I loved Allow Me to Retort. It's a powerful and important book of brightly alive ideas. Mystal deconstructs tired arguments and failed positions with his signature intelligence, humor, grace, and extraordinary wit. His big brain, bright ideas and fierce advocacy for what is right are an antidote to the poison of our current political system." - Don Winslow, bestselling author of The Border
This information about Allow Me to Retort was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elie Mystal is the Nation's legal analyst and justice correspondent, an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center, and the legal editor of the More Perfect podcast on the Supreme Court for Radiolab. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, the former executive editor of Above the Law, a former associate at Debevoise & Plimpton, and a frequent guest on MSNBC and Sirius XM. The author of Allow Me to Retort (The New Press), he lives in New York.
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