By Alphonso David
A prominent conservative lawyer recently addressed what he called “Bitching Minorities” and offered a proposal: one-way tickets out of the country, six months of living expenses, the renunciation of American citizenship, and a command to never return. He closed with a racist insult about Black women’s hair.
We should begin with who wrote those words.
Mike Davis is not a fringe commentator with no connection to legal or political power. He clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch, served as chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, and helped oversee 278 confirmations, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh and a record number of federal appellate judges during President Donald Trump’s first term. He founded and leads the Article III Project, which openly works to shape the judiciary and the public narrative surrounding it. Davis was also widely reported to have been under consideration for attorney general in the second Trump administration, although he was not selected.
His résumé is why his statement deserves more than a passing condemnation. A lawyer who has helped shape the federal bench, advised senators on senior executive appointments, and remains close to the center of conservative legal power was telling communities of color that their demands for repair make them unworthy of citizenship.
I am also a lawyer. I have spent much of my career defending civil rights and challenging institutions that deny people equal access to opportunity. So, lawyer to lawyer, I want to annotate what Davis wrote — not because his meaning is obscure but because the legal project surrounding his words is too important to miss.
“Dear Bitching Minorities”
Annotation: The claimant becomes the offense.
In law, people who allege an injury are claimants. Citizens who petition their government are exercising a constitutional right. Communities that identify documented discrimination are not “bitching.”
But this opening performs an important act of delegitimization: It turns the assertion of a right into a character defect. The problem is no longer the discrimination. The problem is that minorities will not remain silent about it.
“Here’s my proposal for your reparations”
Annotation: The remedy is mocked so the injury never has to be answered.
Remedies are not alien to the rule of law; they are essential to it. A legal right without a meaningful remedy is little more than a promise that can be broken without consequence.
Yet the contemporary attack on racial equity depends on treating every attempt to address an established injury as an illegitimate benefit. Under that theory, centuries of exclusion may be acknowledged as history, but any present-day response is condemned as discrimination.
“One-way tickets anywhere. Six months of living expenses.”
Annotation: Removal is offered in place of repair.
This is not a proposal to remedy exclusion. It is a proposal to complete it.
If people of color believe the country has failed to honor its commitments, Davis’s answer is not to examine the breach. It is to remove the people demanding accountability.
That same instinct now appears in legal and political campaigns, as they are targeting Black and Brown people en masse for deportation from the country while working to strip Black and Brown citizens of the economic opportunities we need to survive in this country.
“Renounce your U.S. citizenship. Never come back.”
Annotation: Citizenship is treated as conditional.
The Constitution does not reserve citizenship for people who are satisfied with the country as they found it. Black people do not forfeit our place in the nation by demanding that it live up to its laws.
The demand that Black communities and people of color leave if they object to injustice rests on a revealing premise: that the country belongs more fully to some of us than to others, and that those with the least power must either accept the existing order or surrender their claim to America altogether.
“Good luck. You’ll need it.”
Annotation: Vulnerability is the point.
The taunt assumes that people denied the protections and resources of the United States will become more vulnerable once they leave.
That is precisely why access matters. Economic opportunity, education, credit, contracting, political representation, and freedom of association are not ornamental. They determine whether citizenship carries substance or merely a name.
“Especially with that nappy-ass head of hair.”
Annotation: The pretext falls away.
After pages of briefs and years of speeches insisting that the assault on racial-equity programs is only about neutrality, fairness, and fidelity to the Constitution, the final sentence exposes the game.
Blackness is not invisible here. It is visible enough to ridicule, insult, and target.
Under the emerging legal order, race may be named when it is used to demean us, but not when communities organize to protect themselves, when institutions try to remedy exclusion, or when the law measures discrimination.
Davis’s post says the quiet part “out loud.” The rhetoric tells communities of color to leave the country. The legal strategy is designed to push us out of the marketplace, the classroom, the halls of Congress, and the institutions we built when other doors were closed.
A professional obligation
Lawyers have influence because our profession gives us access to institutions that can convert ideas into enforceable power. We advise officials. We select judges. We write rules, file lawsuits, interpret statutes, and shape the boundaries of constitutional protection.
That authority carries obligations that cannot be waved away with the claim that a racist statement was merely a joke or an effort to provoke.
Davis is free to expose his worldview. The rest of us should understand and process what it reveals.
This one social media post does not, standing alone, prove the motive of every official or litigant attacking racial-equity programs. But it illuminates the political and ideological environment in which those attacks are occurring. It rebuts the fiction that this campaign is simply a bloodless disagreement over doctrine, disconnected from hostility toward the people whose rights and opportunities are being narrowed.
So, lawyer to lawyer, let me be clear: the Constitution is not a deed held by white men. American citizenship is not conditioned on silence. Black people do not lose our right to belong because we insist on remedies for discrimination, organize around shared experiences, support students, build institutions, or demand a fair opportunity to compete.
We are not leaving.
We are not renouncing our citizenship.
We are not surrendering the institutions our communities built.
And we will continue using the law for what it is supposed to do: protect individual rights, remedy injuries, restrain abuses of power, and move this country closer to the promises it has made but has yet to fully keep.
Alphonso David is a civil rights attorney and president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum. He serves as co-counsel defending the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and as co-lead counsel representing Texas businesses challenging the dismantling of the state’s Historically Underutilized Business program.
That Mike Davis and his ilk have their mitts of the levers of power is disturbing but, sadly, not surprising. Thank you for this eloquent rebuttal.