Short thread re: Amy Coney Barrett. The US Constitution is a COLONIAL document: written by colonists, written under conditions of colonialism. Despite its surface claims, "originalism" strikes me as anti-historicist in practice and, as a result, anti-humanist in its effects.

Constitutionalists remind me of academics who focus on a single thinker--e.g. Kant, Mill, or even Fanon, for what it's worth--who feel untroubled making broad claims about the human experience based on the ideas of a single person. In this instance, a single document.

It leaves me confounded at the nature of legal education in the US--in particular, its limited and insular understanding of historicism. For sure, other academic fields are equally at fault for their atrophied historical knowledge and sensibility.

But the US Constitution and its signatories at the time of its writing depended on the dehumanization of Black life through slavery, violence toward and the displacement of Native peoples, and the patriarchal denial of suffrage for women. This isn't news.

Which suggests that the active suppression of history--history as it is lived by *people*, not as "lived" by ideas, not as "lived" by the law--is standard routine in American law programs.