He grew up speaking a language of the enslaved on the shores of Pin Point, Georgia. He would become the most powerful Black man in America, using the astonishing power vested in a Supreme Court justice to hold back his own people. Now he sits atop an activist right-wing court poised to undo the progressivism of the past century:

All America has ever seen is race. To pretend otherwise is to deny the truth of your and my life. Ain’t no amount of Federalist Society cant or jurisprudence dressed up in novel and abstruse legal theories or self-serving advice cautioning Black people to cease talking about race is gone change that. How can we stop talking? It boggles my mind that you fetishize a document that held in its original form that women were not and wouldn’t ever be citizens, that your/our people were not and wouldn’t ever be humans.

Like you can’t see that there were many things that document held to be true that were not true, many things that the framers, no few of them our enslavers, got incontrovertibly, manifestly wrong. Like in your “textualist” or “originalist” or “natural law”—or whatever term you apply to give a good account of your work—reading of it, you failed to divine that one of their main intents was for no Black person to set foot in a courthouse less it be in chains. Come the fuck on; that document in its best, most pristine, unblemished, unamended form is a Greatest Hits, circa 1788.

Ain’t that when they had us, Clarence? Ain’t that where they want us?

Easy for you to say, make it on your own, stop talking about race. Did you make it on your own? And of the things that fill that prodigious mind of yours, name one larger than race, Black man. I dare you.

My god, dude, what the hell happened to you?

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