Well before the verdict was issued, Nation legal affairs correspondent Elie Mystal predicted that Kyle Rittenhouse would walk away from charges of murder, the judge in the matter having given plenty of signs that he endorsed what Mystal calls “the permissiveness of White violence.”

But neither was he surprised at the outcome of the Ahmaud Arbery case in Georgia. “Rittenhouse had a defense that a reasonable person could understand,” he tells Kirkus. “What the McMichaels had was a lynching on camera, and there is no credible defense for lynching. Even in Georgia, even with a mostly White jury, they couldn’t pull it off.”

Both cases, and many others like them, inform the arguments in Mystal’s new book, Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution (The New Press, March 1), which reflects two long-standing interests. The first is a path Mystal chose when, after graduating from Harvard Law School, he decided that there were matters of the bench that he just wasn’t interested in. “Murder’s not for me,” he says. Neither was corporate law, which he found devastatingly dull. But he’d always been good at constitutional law, and when he decided to switch over to journalism, he reckoned that the Supreme Court was “horribly undercovered” and “blindingly White,” two strong reasons for him to stake out a beat covering the highest court in the land and explain how its justices arrive at the decisions they make.

Of Haitian descent, Mystal has plenty of experience in how “blindingly White” justice works. Though he lives in a leafy, well-heeled neighborhood in suburban New York, he has been pulled over numerous times—“only a dozen or so,” he says with meaningful emphasis—for what is familiarly called “driving while Black.” On a recent car trip, he found himself wondering why on Earth he was putting himself and his family in unnecessary danger, a prospect that worried him enough that he absentmindedly ran a stop sign. “If we’d been T-boned,” he says, “we would have been likelier to die than in a traffic stop.”

Even so, as he argues in Allow Me To Retort, the unequal application of the Fourth Amendment and its guarantees of reasonable search and the necessity of probable cause is the single most damaging aspect of the Constitution for people of color. “We don’t apply that amendment with any teeth when it comes to the rights of people who are Black or brown in this country,” Mystal says. “What holds us back in that case is not anything that’s in the Constitution; it’s how the Constitution is being interpreted.”

What allows such unequal application of what should be a universal law, Mystal adds, is that the Constitution is grounded for all to see in the culture and interests of 18th-century White men, most of them slaveholders. “It is a document designed to create a society of enduring White male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights White men could be convinced to share,” he holds. Those rights are not many, one reason that Mystal disdains the so-called originalism espoused by the conservative justices now on the bench. “Originalists will always point to an enumerated right when they want the federal government to do something in violation of the Tenth Amendment and the principle of federalism,” he argues. “But that is why they work so hard to deny the existence of unenumerated rights.”

Second Amendment absolutism is a favored originalist trope. He writes, “Gun rights are not about self-defense. They literally never have been. Gun rights are about menacing, intimidating, and killing racial minorities, if necessary.” Another element is the Electoral College, a relic of the slaveholding past that Mystal hopes to see abolished by a constitutional amendment—something permissible only if one sees the Constitution as an evolving document and not as an inviolable sacred text.

Mystal’s work is grounded in years of research, reporting, and reflection. For all that, his book is also written so that readers without law degrees can follow his arguments effortlessly, as when he writes about distinguishing protected classes from the rest of society, “Being an asshole is not a protected class, which is lucky because I discriminate against them all the time.”

“When I wrote this book,” Mystal tells Kirkus, “I didn’t know much about critical race theory, and I certainly didn’t write it to take part in that conversation. But now that the book is out, I see that of course it belongs there. I set out to write about the Constitution from a particular point of view: how the Constitution works if you’re not White, which isn’t well at all.”

Jan. 6 was also much on his mind as he wrote his book. “What I hope Allow Me To Retort will do is to get people to begin to question how the system works,” he says. “How we pick our president, the most important leadership role in government, is just dumb. How we apportion seats to the Senate is, too. And as for those nine unelected officials who serve for life....

“Outcomes are choices,” he tells Kirkus. “We’ve chosen all these things.” Clearly, by Elie Mystal’s lights, it’s time to choose something else.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.