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

Elie Mystal

Mar 2022 · The New Press

About this ebook

Instant New York Times Bestseller

MSNBC legal commentator Elie Mystal thinks that Republicans are wrong about the law almost all of the time. Now, instead of talking about this on cable news, Mystal explains why in his first book.

“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

Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.

Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.

You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn’t have to be.

Ratings and reviews

Horrendous style of writing, delivers sentiments and speculations from a biased perspective, supposed to have answers, but on the contrary avoids a scientific representation to recall historical events, instead focuses on a linear biased perspective.

Good information about the Constitution as it applies to the law application. How politics affect the consistency in how the law is applied in every situation. How the Supreme Court consistently shapes how our laws are passed and applied on a political level and; not according to constitutional requirements based on a free and equal society.

Baring all the bias for everyone to see! If you've ever wondered how a "Christian" nation could be so inherently racist for more than 240 years, then you owe it to yourself to bring to this book your very open mind as you take a peek into what our Constitution looks like through the lens of a man who knows how it's been used to support and defend racism throughout our country's history. The author takes us through history as he demonstrates case after case, event after event, bigot after bigot along this nation's road that led to painting "Black Lives Matter" on the pavement in front of the White House. I recognize that I'm far too pale-skinned to truly understand where he's coming from, so I accept that those points of his with which I disagree are probably evidence of my own bias more than his. This is an easy book to read comprehensively, with plenty of straight talk and scathing humor, but it's a difficult book to process emotionally because it demands that we each examine our own roles and challenge ourselves to walk in the other's shoes before we relax comfortably in our belief that we know what our Constitution says, and means. Critical thinking, especially in the political arena, is woefully absent from too much of our citizenry today, but books like this one go a long way towards correcting that deficiency. If you vote (and you should) you owe it to our very democracy to educate yourself as much as you can. Start with this book to expand your understanding of what this nation stands for, and what it should be. I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book.

About the author

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.