One Cuts, One Chooses

One cuts, one chooses. It's a simple parenting hack that some use to teach children about fairness. Give two kids a cake: the first can cut it however they'd like, but the second gets to choose which piece they take. It's no surprise that children raised with this often learn to cut perfectly equal shares. The rules of the game have a way of shaping behavior.

Philosophers have been thinking about this problem for a long time. John Rawls built an entire framework for justice around a similar idea: a truly fair system is one you'd design without knowing which role you'd occupy. Would you write the rules of society differently if you didn't know whether you'd be born rich or poor, powerful or marginalized? Most would. That's the point.

Now consider how we've applied this to free speech (or rather, how we haven't).

In courtrooms across the country, prosecutors have used rap lyrics as evidence to establish motive, character, and criminal intent. The practice is widespread and well-documented. But it is not applied symmetrically. It is rap, not country murder ballads. It is Black and brown artists, not the genres that have long romanticized violence in predominantly white communities. I've worked on some of these cases through Rap on Trial. What strikes me isn't just the injustice to the individual… it's that one group is cutting and choosing.

The system was designed this way. It gets written into law, normalized through precedent, and then defended as neutral, as equal. When the knife is always in the same hand, we stop noticing it as a choice at all.

What if that same legal logic were turned on your sarcasm, your political comedy, your protest art? The framework already exists. It's just not pointed at you yet. What if one side could wage a ware but the other side dictated if it was justified?

The deeper lesson from that parenting trick isn't really about cutting skill. It's that the goal was never to produce a perfect slicer. It was to raise a child who understands that the cake ought to be shared. The mechanics of fairness matter less than the underlying commitment to it.

So maybe the better question isn't who should hold the knife but rather if we are willing to put it down.