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The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Apple Books. Together with Apple Books, Oprah is bringing you her next book club pick, Deacon King Kong by James McBride. A story of connections and community in 1969 New York City. Download Deacon King Kong on Apple Books at apple.co/obc, then explore millions of other books and audio books on the Apple Books app.

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David Remnick:
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. Over the last week we've seen some remarkable headlines about cities and states promising real action on police violence and racial justice. Promises that would have seemed impossible just a few weeks ago. At George Floyd's funeral in Houston, the Reverend Al Sharpton said that he was encouraged by how white people have responded with demands for change.

Al Sharpton:
Floyd could have been anybody. But then the reaction was not anything because somewhere I read in the Bible that God said he would pour out his spirit among all flesh. And that's why when I heard them talking about, they never thought they'd see young whites marching like they marching now. All over the world I've seen grandchildren of slave masters, tearing down slave master's statue over in England and put it in the river. I pour out my spirit among all flesh. I've seen whites walking past curfews, saying, "Black Lives Matter, no justice, no peace." I pour out my spirit among all flesh.

David Remnick:
It may be that the shock and horror of Floyd's death before our eyes on video has finally shaken millions of white people from years of drift and complacency. For a long time, Suzanne Plihcik has been talking to white people about the reality of entrenched racism. She's a trainer with the Racial Equity Institute, and a co-founder of that group. Suzanne Plihcik spoke with the New Yorker's Dorothy Wickenden.

Dorothy Wickenden:
We have to put our cards on the table right away and point out that you're a white woman from the South and I'm a white woman from the North and that will inform our discussion. How did you become engaged with this kind of work?

Suzanne Plihcik:
It's very difficult to really capture what all the touch points were but to be a little white and linear, I can tell you essentially, I found early in my life, a real sadness for people who were hurt, who were harmed, who were living in poverty. After the birth of my children that came into sharper focus. And as they enter school, it came into still sharper focus as I saw the contrast between what was available to my children and what was not available to children of color, often, not always, often.

Suzanne Plihcik:
So it seemed to me at that time that the way we dealt with the child who came to school in flip-flops in January was to provide shoes. And it seemed to me at the time, that provision of needs was very, very important. And it is important, it's not unimportant. But as you do that, you soon realize that you have done nothing to prevent those needs from occurring again. So I move from that very charity approach into policy needs to be changed. We've got to do something in a larger way to get at the root causes. Of course, you don't do that very long before you realize that even when policy changes, that there is something in our culture, a narrative that continues to pull back those successes that you have. And I had the great gift of coming to a training that explained to me, this one was by the People's Institute at the time, that that thing was racism. And then we decided to form the Racial Equity Institute, and to do the work of bringing an analysis to people that would make them more effective in the work they do.

Dorothy Wickenden:
Many companies offer diversity training. But those sessions have almost no effect, if any, on how white Americans go about their lives. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what makes the tactics and mission of the Racial Equity Institute different.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Yeah, we don't do diversity training. We don't do prejudice reduction, all those things have their values I'm sure. But even if you were able to make people more sensitive and reduce prejudice and bigotry and certain racial prejudice, you then send them out into a world that is operating from a structure that promotes the supremacy of white people. That ensures that whatever you do, is going to disproportionately advantage white people, even when that's not your intent. And that division, it continues to work well, because we don't understand it. We don't understand where it's coming from. And we continue to put it in the context of mean-spirited, racially charged people, and statements and acts. Those things are bad. They're incredibly bad and wrong.

Suzanne Plihcik:
But it's important to understand that racism happens and this is the biggest lesson of my life, without my intent, that we are set up for it to happen. And so I have to understand that I benefit from that, whether I want to as a white person or not. I have to further understand it doesn't make me a bad immoral person. It makes me a beneficiary of a system set up hundreds of years ago to benefit people who have come to be called white.

Dorothy Wickenden:
Can you give us an example of how a well-meaning organization you've worked with, determined to pursue racial diversity and all of the best values, has been taken aback by what you have to tell them?

Suzanne Plihcik:
Well, I think most of them are taken aback. But we were called some years ago to a public private partnership, a school actually that had been created to be a multicultural school, they had all the very best intents. They however, we`re having a very difficult time recruiting and retaining students and faculty of color. So the night before we did our training, the core of the school, all white, took us out to dinner and they began to tell us all the things they had done to become multicultural. And it was a long list.

Suzanne Plihcik:
One of their favorite things was to have what we call the International Day, to bring in people from many cultures and have them share their culture and their cultural ways and they brought in everybody. In addition to that, they did many things that they thought would be appealing to people of color. They would do spoken word, they would do stepping, you name it, they did it. And our very wise director, Deena Hayes-Greene, said to them at the end of this litany, "So what did you do for white people?" And their jaw dropped.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Because you see the culture that was keeping them from attracting and retaining students and faculty of color was the one culture they had not examined, it's white culture. It's our way of being in the world, our set of values. And the invitation they issued is very much like the invitation we as white people have issued since the Civil Rights Act, which is, come be like us. Don't bring your ways of being, don't bring your ways of knowing, come be like us.

Dorothy Wickenden:
So how should groups like that go about what they're doing? That's a huge project. It involves changing the deepest preconceptions that everyone has about him and herself.

Suzanne Plihcik:
We believe it starts with an understanding of how we got here. Then we need an understanding of how white organizational culture operates, how it is different from more relational cultures. We need an understanding that we are in fact as white people, not wrong and bad, but operating out of a culture that we impose on other people. It's okay to have your culture, it's okay to be who you are in the world based on your history. It's not okay to impose your way of being on everybody else. And to make laws and build structures and build institutions based on that. And that's hard, that's hard. But that study, that understanding's got to be the first step.

Dorothy Wickenden:
So much of this problem, I think, derives from Americans ignorance of our actual history as it played out. You argue that the origins of the concept of whiteness, which is an artificial concept, stretches back hundreds of years. The story of John Punch really brings this home. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Well, John Punch was an African indentured servant. He was not kidnapped and enslaved. Although, it's a pretty fine line. This is early in the 1600s. John Punch was an African indentured servant who ran away with a Dutchman and a Scotsman. They ran away together but they got caught. The Dutchman and Scotsman are sentenced to four additional years of servitude one to the master to whom they were already indentured and three to the colony. But John Punch is sentenced to perpetual servitude.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Now that was done, not because he was the leader or had some special part, although, I'm sure there were all kinds of explanations in the time, but to ensure the allegiance of the white indentured servants to the white people at the top. It was important to ensure that people of color who are either indentured servants or kidnapped and enslaved and white people who were largely indentured servants did not come together and challenge the system oppressing them. Your allegiance now is not to the black African you've been running away with, it is to the people who gave you this little thing. And we have done that as white people knowingly and unknowingly, for the subsequent 300 years.

Dorothy Wickenden:
It's just extraordinary. So the protests following the killing of George Floyd do seem to have had some clear effect.

Suzanne Plihcik:
Yes.

Dorothy Wickenden:
It looks to me like this could be an inflection point. Does it look that way to you?

Suzanne Plihcik:
It absolutely does. I mean, the question is sustaining the momentum, showing up, not just for the protests, but when the protests are over. Showing up again the next day, and the next and the next for all the things that we need to continue to fight for. What we teach is that the things that we face in this world, the injustice that we face in this world, organizing is essentially the answer. That we need to learn to organize outside of institutions and inside of institutions. That building a base of power to challenge power at those grassroots levels and then beyond that is what we need to be doing. I mean, it is the work and that means you've got to show up again the next day.

Dorothy Wickenden:
So there is a tendency after incidents of racially motivated violence in white culture, and you can see it right now playing out in the media, to ask people of color for their insights about racism. But scholars and activists, and even some of our recent presidential candidates have been pointing out what you're pointing out that systemic racism is really a white problem. So what role do conversations among white communities, or conversations between white people like you and I are having play in confronting and addressing the problem of systemic racism?

Suzanne Plihcik:
Well, I think that they can play a very big role, the potential, I would say is absolutely there. I have been somewhat heartened by the number of statements that companies and organization and individuals have come out with condemning these recent acts of brutal, unconscionable violence. So to speak out against such things is always an important thing to do. We had a mentor years ago who said, "If you can get three white people with no people of color present to speak out against racism, you've done revolutionary work." I didn't believe it until I tried.

Dorothy Wickenden:
Wow.

Suzanne Plihcik:
But that that speaking is important and to stop at that will be the tragedy compounding the tragedy. I mean, one of the things that should be respectfully and compassionately asked of all of these statements, all of these speakers, is where have you been? There have been opportunities every day to speak out against, to stand against institutional racism. Where have you been in the racial health disparities horror, the achievement gap, the disparities in lending, in the justice system? We've got to ask ourselves, where have we been? As this problem, this institutional structural problem, continued to take stronger and stronger hold of our country.

David Remnick:
Suzanne Plihcik is a co-founder of the Racial Equity Institute, and she spoke with Dorothy Wickenden, our executive editor and the host of The New Yorker's, podcast, Politics and More. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, more to come.

Speaker 1:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Apple Books. Together with Apple Books, Oprah is bringing you her next book club pick, Deacon King Kong by James McBride. A story of connections, community and love in 1969 New York City. It's a social novel with a heart of gold and characters that will crack you up and make you cry. Download Deacon King Kong at apple.co/obc. You can also experience millions of other books and audio books on the Apple Books app already on your iPhone and iPad. There you'll find bestsellers, classics, up and coming authors and more. Get started today and read with us.

Speaker 1:
WNYC Studios is supported by Capital One. Capital One knows life doesn't alert you about your credit card, that's why they created Eno, the Capital One assistant that catches things that might look wrong with your credit card. Like over tipping, duplicate charges or potential fraud, then sends an alert to your phone and helps you fix it. It's another way Capital One is watching out for your money when you're not. Capital One, what's in your wallet. See captialone.com for details.

Jill Lepore:
A question was nagging me, who killed truth. This truth problem, it isn't just bad, it's deadly. I'm Jill Lepore, and I'm a historian at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker. I spend a lot of time trying to solve mysteries like this one. So I decided to start a podcast, it's called The Last Archive. I'll tell 10 stories from the last 100 years. A history of America and of our arguments about true and evidence. The Last Archive, brought to you by Pushkin Industries.

David Remnick:
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 8:
Good evening and welcome to the New York Congressional District 17 Democratic primary candidate's forum.

Speaker 9:
Can you hear me?

Speaker 10:
There we go.

Speaker 8:
There you go. Do you want to mute that microphone?

Speaker 11:
Sorry.

Speaker 8:
You're good.

David Remnick:
With everything that is going on in the world, it's a very tough time to run for office. A presidential nominee can always get some airtime. But what about all the down ballot candidates whose names you can't quite recall? How are they supposed to run for office in the middle of a pandemic? Think about it. You can't go door to door shaking hands. The county fair is probably canceled. And you really shouldn't be kissing any babies. And by the way, good luck fundraising. And now you're stuck debating your opponents on Zoom.

Speaker 8:
I don't know that my voice is going in and out.

Speaker 9:
Can you repeat the question? I was so busy looking for my unmute button.

Speaker 8:
You're good, you're good.

Speaker 11:
No, I'm not moving it. I think someone else is.

Speaker 8:
No worries.

Speaker 12:
[inaudible 00:18:21] try to maybe position my computer a little closer our WiFi. Maybe that will help?

Speaker 8:
Okay, so let's get back to the question. Would anybody like a rebuttal?

David Remnick:
The New Yorker's Eric Lach has been taking a close look at the primary election in one congressional district, the 17th District of New York, and he's looking to see how the candidates are adapting to seemingly impossible conditions.

Eric Lach:
I started following the Democratic primary race in New York's 17th congressional district. That's the suburbs north of the city. And this was a race that was in full swing when the pandemic hit. The primary day is June 23rd. It's an open race with many candidates running and no clear favorite. One of the first people in district I called up is Barrett Seaman.

Barrett Seaman:
Morning, Eric.

Eric Lach:
How you doing? Seaman is a former Time magazine correspondent and editor. He covered the Reagan White House in the 1980s. And he now writes about politics for a local newspaper in the 17th district, named the Hudson Independent.

Barrett Seaman:
You know, all of the traditional measures that we used to winnow out large fields like we have up here, they're not all gone, but they're just about all gone.

Eric Lach:
Like what?

Barrett Seaman:
Well, the ability to hold a town meeting and draw an audience and have people like you and me go and see how many people actually show up. So the inability to hold a public meeting has an enormous impact on elections.

Eric Lach:
Even before the pandemic hit, the race in the 17th could charitably be described as a clown car. More than a dozen people either launched campaigns or expressed interest in running in the 17th. But as the campaign winds down here, we're down to a field of seven. The district has been represented in Congress since the late '80s by Nita Lowey, and it's a reliably democratic area. So the Democratic primary race essentially is the election. The winner on June 23rd, is all but assured to be the next representative of the 17th in Congress. When the pandemic hit, and New York State went into lockdown, do it the race in the 17th. And functionally what that meant is that the kinds of events that make up the bulk of campaigning in a congressional race, town halls, meet and greets, fundraisers, debates. They all migrated onto video platforms like Zoom and Facebook Live.

Eric Lach:
David Carlucci is the state senator from Rockland County, which is the west side of the 17th district. He has a reputation as a consummate retail politician. But in the last few months, he's had to go from shaking hands and meeting people to essentially creating programming.

David Carlucci:
Well, one of the things I'm doing regularly now, is I do Facebook Live, like a town hall. Every week, I do two of them a week. And I have special guests on, actually, today at 4:00 o'clock, I have the head of the Humane Society here in the Hudson Valley.

Eric Lach:
Oh cool.

David Carlucci:
And yeah, she's going to be talking about the pets and what's going on with the adoptions and all that. I know the last time I visited Humane Society, Hudson Valley Humane Society, you had so many different animals there. What are some of the unique animals that you have there now?

Speaker 16:
So we have this little bunny who's looking for adoption.

David Carlucci:
You know, for me, I'm kind of learning on that space. To see hey, okay, we got some likes here or I have this many views.

Speaker 16:
And today we just adopted a Moluccan cockatoo. She only has one leg on but she was adopted and she actually went to live near Buffalo, New York.

David Carlucci:
And seeing, oh, okay, I had this guest on and people really reacted well to that. And then sometimes I'll have a guest on and I think they're great and we have a dynamic conversation and there's only like 20 people watching.

Eric Lach:
There is no textbook for lockdown campaigning and the transition to online happened so fast and was so new that it left several of the candidates in the race vulnerable to people who wanted to mess with them. Evelyn Farkas is the former Department of Defense official who's running. And during a Zoom event she held in April, she got Zoom bombed, which is when people take over a Zoom event and do horrible gross things on the screen.

Evelyn Farkas:
The irony was that we were talking about disinformation. And we had been talking for awhile and we have noticed a couple of weird things like a Trump face and then somebody typed in an offensive word and then we-

Eric Lach:
In the chat.

Evelyn Farkas:
Yeah, in the chat, exactly. And then in the windows, the squares on the Zoom box we see somebody, this young man seemed to be putting his hand in the elastic of his trousers. And so we tossed the person out and that was that. I also heard subsequently, I didn't notice it, that there was some adult porn being shown in a window. I'm not sure if was that window or another one. So having the open system, we realized right away, oh, we need to upgrade. So we upgraded and then immediately our problem disappeared, we had control.

Eric Lach:
Zoom bombing can be horrible. Two days after Farkas experienced her Zoom bombing, another candidate in the race, Mondaire Jones, who's running on a kind of Bernie Sanders Medicare for All, forgiving student debt platform, who would be the first black gay man in Congress had his own event hijacked. This time by a participant who used the app's screenshare function to display child pornography to everybody who was logged on. The campaign managed to kick that person out and reported the incident to the F.B.I. and felt compelled to tell the people who had attended that a therapist had volunteered to host a separate Zoom call for anybody who needed to talk about what they had seen.

Eric Lach:
Zoom is a new platform with new challenges. Some of the candidates in the race have turned to slightly older ways to reach voters. Allison Fine, who's the former board chair of NARAL, has also written a number of books about online organizing. In some ways, she's been the candidate in the race who's dived most enthusiastically into the new reality. She announced early on that she was dismissing her field team and making her campaign all digital, including and up to the old-fashioned email newsletter.

Allison Fine:
And I'll tell you something about that morning email. When I first did it, I had somebody say to me, "No, no, [inaudible 00:25:34] make it pretty, right?" And I sat down and I thought, you know what, Eric, no, I actually want this to look like I'm sitting at a Smith Corona typewriter. And I stripped it down to its essence. Being empathetic to what's going on, to being at times funny, and to getting people real useful information.

Eric Lach:
And in a crisis, it works. One of the things about this election is that it seems like a difficult moment to get people to engage. I mean, this is a district that hasn't had to think about a congressional race in three decades. And it's a particularly distracted moment right now.

Allison Fine:
There's no question that people are in pain, and they're worried and they're distracted. So we're not going to be able to break through all of that noise. But all the metrics of engagement are going up online. And I'm starting to get constituent calls. I'm not in office [crosstalk 00:26:39].

Eric Lach:
People calling you up?

Allison Fine:
Yeah. So last Monday, a young Latina woman called me up, and she said she personally has been getting food and essential supplies to undocumented people and families in the river towns because they were immediately cut off. And she called me up and she said, "I heard that you help people solve problems. Can you help me?" And so I got her connected to a local nonprofit called Neighbor's Link to at least give her some fundraising infrastructure for what she's doing and connect with their volunteers.

Eric Lach:
Fine has made that 5,000 person newsletter the centerpiece of her campaign. Barrett Seaman, the local reporter, isn't totally sold on this approach, he's looking for evidence that it's going to move the needle on election day.

Barrett Seaman:
I mean, she's sending out these very practical, useful, intelligent emails, two or three times a week we get these things, they're pretty good stuff, and they're useful information. But so what if the same 5,000 people are seeing it and nobody else?

Eric Lach:
And this is a question in many kinds of races these days. It's like a following is not necessarily constituency, right? Are those 5,000 people who get that newsletter are those voters, are those voters in the district?

Barrett Seaman:
Exactly, yeah, that's exactly right. It's that you don't know that those 5,000 people are going to vote for you come June 23rd. It's just that they're receiving your emails.

Eric Lach:
What's going to give candidates the edge in this race? It's an unprecedented situation, no question. But money is still money. Adam Schleifer is the heir to a local pharmaceutical fortune, and thanks in large part to his in his family's money, he's been able to blanket the district with television ads for the past few months.

Adam Schleifer:
While our essential workers and healthcare heroes risked their lives, Trump led us down by ignoring science and giving us toxic advice. I learned how to lead working for Governor Cuomo as a consumer protection ...

Eric Lach:
There are two candidates in the race who currently hold state level office in New York, and that sets them apart from the field. One of them is David Carlucci, the state senator.

David Carlucci:
So I think given this crisis that we're in, in a way it's been on the political side somewhat beneficial, because I can really prove my worth. And my phone in the Senate has been ringing off the hook.

Eric Lach:
And can you give some examples of what that's meant?

David Carlucci:
Well, you mean like what type of cases?

Eric Lach:
Yeah, yeah.

David Carlucci:
Well, the number one is overwhelmingly, is helping people with the unemployment insurance claims. We have gotten literally, like thousands of inquiries about that. So obviously, I can't ask people for their vote when I'm working in that capacity. But it does just help prove the worth and I've realized that as a senator, as a state senator, at least, people don't seek me out when things are going great. They come find me when stuff has hit the fan.

Eric Lach:
The challenge of campaigning in a pandemic is how to connect with people at a time of social distancing. It's how to engage people at a time of maximum distraction. And it's how to talk about the issues during a crisis. In the 17th, with just days to go before election day, nobody can say which way this election is going to turn. They've all sort of got a shot here. And the challenge that they're facing, if COVID-19 stays with us over the summer and through the fall, is going to be faced by candidates and races across the country.

Barrett Seaman:
So they're in the blind. They're just sort of like a bunch of people with blindfolds on wandering through a room wondering when they're going to hit a wall. And not knowing where the wall is. And the same is true for both the candidates and the voters, is that we don't have the normal hooks to hang things on that we expect in making decisions about elections.

David Remnick:
Barrett Seaman writes for the Hudson Independent and he spoke with The New Yorker's Eric Lach. The primary in New York State is coming up on June 23rd. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, stick around.

Speaker 1:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Apple Books. Together with Apple Books, Oprah is bringing you her next book club pick, Deacon King Kong by James McBride. A story of connections, community and love in 1969 New York City. It's a social novel with a heart of gold and characters that will crack you up and make you cry. Download Deacon King Kong at apple.co/obc. You can also experience millions of other books and audio books on the Apple Books app already on your iPhone and iPad. There you'll find bestsellers, classics, up and coming authors and more. Get started today and read with us.

David Remnick:
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. This month, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision that will affect hundreds of thousands of Americans, undocumented immigrants protected under DACA, the people known as Dreamers. DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. President Obama issued the policy as an executive order after an immigration bill, the Dream Act, repeatedly failed to pass Congress. The Trump administration ordered DACA canceled, a lawsuit was filed to prevent it from doing so, which reached the Supreme Court in pretty short order. If the court rules in favor of the Trump administration, all the undocumented people who have been living with relative freedom under DACA could be subject to deportation. Most of these people grew up in this country and some have no memories of any other.

David Remnick:
In November, Jonathan Blitzer spoke to two of the lawyers making the case for the Dreamers, right as they were going before the Supreme Court. I want to play that story again now, to remind us of what's at stake. Here's Jonathan Blitzer.

Jonathan Blitzer:
I first met Luis Cortes in February of 2017, because I was writing a story about a DACA recipient, and I needed to get in touch with that person's lawyer. Luis was his lawyer. In the course of the conversation, it starts to come out that Luis himself is a DACA recipient, and so his own fate is bound up in the fates of all of the clients he's representing who also have DACA.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Luis was born in Morelia, Michoacan in Mexico and came to the U.S. with his parents when he was barely a year old. He had no sense growing up that he didn't have legal status.

Luis Cortes:
The first time I think I really realized what being undocumented meant was when I was in eighth grade. And there was a trip to Europe that the eighth grade class was taking. And in order to offset some of the cost, we were going to sell See's Candies chocolate in order to fundraise. And I sold a ton of chocolate, I was hustling that chocolate hardcore. And I had raised enough money to go and it wasn't until after where I let my parents know I've made it and I have all this money that they let me know you can't go because you weren't born here. And that's all I knew at that time. I couldn't go because I wasn't born here. But I didn't really know much more of the mechanics in eighth grade. I remember being very pissed that I wasn't able to go.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Yeah, yeah. And you go to college, from college you go straight to law school. So when you started in law school, it's 2010. DACA wasn't a thought on anyone's mind yet, as such. And so there were questions too, about what your working life would look like, even after law school, right? Because you didn't have necessarily a legal avenue to be employable at that time.

Luis Cortes:
That's right, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jonathan Blitzer:
What was your sense of what DACA was? Did it immediately seem like a lifeline to you, was it something you were suspicious of? How did you understand it?

Luis Cortes:
Yeah. I had just finished my second year of law school, and it was during the summer. So I was going into my last year. And then DACA is announced, as I'm about to start my last year of law school. And it almost seemed too good to be true. It seemed like it fell from the sky.

Barack Obama:
Let's be clear, this is not amnesty. This is not immunity. This is not a path to citizenship. It's not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people. It is the right thing to do.

Luis Cortes:
I decided to apply. In a very nervous way, I submitted my application. The scariest part was going into the DHS offices to get fingerprinted, because those DHS offices are the same offices that ICE is located. So you have the sense of like, what if I get fingerprinted and I don't come out. But I remember when my work permit came in, and I got my social security number. It was life changing.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Yeah. So you go on, thanks in large part to having this lawful status conferred through DACA, you go on to practice immigration law.

Luis Cortes:
Yeah.

Jonathan Blitzer:
You're living your life, you have your clients. You're working in Seattle.

Luis Cortes:
Yeah.

Jonathan Blitzer:
And then 2016 happens. And President Trump takes office and not entirely out of the blue because there had been murmurings of this but still somewhat suddenly, the administration comes out and cancels DACA just outright.

Speaker 23:
Good morning. I'm here today to announce that the program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama administration is being rescinded. The DACA program ...

Luis Cortes:
My reaction was both out of frustration and disappointment. And part of my frustration was that this is the fear realized by hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients when they first applied. What happens if they do away with this program and now they have all of our information.

Jonathan Blitzer:
And this is 700,000 people.

Luis Cortes:
Yes, yeah, hundreds of thousands of people. And their communities and their employers, their spouses, their children. We're talking about millions of people now. So it was a very confusing and kind of chaotic time. We were flooded with phone calls that day, that week, about whether DACA is done away with all together. What now? And interestingly enough, as we're having this conversation, I'm almost having this conversation with myself too, about if DACA does end, what then? And I must explaining it to them, I'm hearing myself saying it out loud, me realizing like what then?

Jonathan Blitzer:
And what were you saying? What were you hearing yourself say?

Luis Cortes:
That there really isn't any other way. That there is no other way to get status and that we're going to be back to what we were before, hiding.

Jonathan Blitzer:
A number of different groups in a number of different venues challenged the legality of how the administration ended DACA in the first place, and you are going to be one of, is it three people?

Luis Cortes:
Four.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Four people sitting at the plaintiff's table in front of the Justices. Who else is going to be at the table?

Luis Cortes:
Right. There was a lot of discussions about who would represent this case and representing the individual DACA recipients, it's going to be myself and Ted Olson, who was formerly the solicitor general under George W. Bush.

Jonathan Blitzer:
And so Ted Olson is not someone just on its face who would be aligned with this cause, I mean, a sort of legendary conservative Supreme Court litigator.

Luis Cortes:
Ted is a very skilled Supreme Court litigator and knows the pace of the arguments and how to ... there's a special art and a science to argue the Supreme Court. So we feel very lucky to have someone like that around.

Ted Olson:
Hello.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Hi, Mr. Olsen.

Ted Olson:
Yes.

Jonathan Blitzer:
How are you? This is Jonathan Blitzer from The New Yorker. Thanks for making the time.

Ted Olson:
We're happy to do it.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Could you talk a bit about what you see is the central issue of this case?

Ted Olson:
It all boils down to whether or not the termination of DACA was legal, and what the reasons for doing so are and what the consequences are. When the government of the United States announces a policy that has an immediate impact on very substantial numbers of persons. The impact on those individuals requires the government to announce reasons for its decision to explain what it is considered in making that decision, explaining why that decision is lawful, so that there will be accountability for those decisions. And this administration announcing the rescission of this program, gave no reasons for the decision, and no explanation for it.

Luis Cortes:
There's this phrase under the Administrative Procedures Act called arbitrary and capricious, an agency can't act arbitrarily or capriciously. And one of the ways that it does that, is that it goes through the rationale and it goes through the consequences of all of a sudden sharply changing a policy. And again, it could consider everything as, yeah, it's worth it, fine. That's fine. As long as it does its homework. And there doesn't seem to be any kind of considerations that were made here.

Jonathan Blitzer:
In terms of your specific strategy now coming before the Justices, are there particular Justices on the court you're targeting your arguments to? How are you thinking about the composition of the court? And how does that impact the way in which you frame your case?

Ted Olson:
Well, what we do is that we attempt to convince all of them. We're not saying what about how any Justice will vote on a particular issue in a particular case or anything like that. But we want to make arguments that are focused on the way the Justices have decided cases in the past. And in this area where all we're asking is for the court to recognize that this administration and by the way, not for the first time, this administration has acted in an arbitrary fashion of ready, fire, aim. And we want the Justices, whichever end of the political spectrum their backgrounds might be to understand that this is a rule of law case. It isn't a liberal or conservative case. It's a rule of law case.

Ted Olson:
But it's a rule of law case involving hundreds of thousands of individuals who will be hurt by an abrupt and unexplained and unjustified change in policy. The human face on this is very, very real to all of these individuals who are going to school, raising families, serving in our armed forces, forming businesses, becoming a part of the community and then having to live with this Sword of Damocles hanging over them all of the time and the uncertainty that that causes. You can imagine how difficult it would be to live a life in the shadow of that doom so to speak. This is a very, very serious thing.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Luis, you're going to be one of the few people in the courtroom, but certainly the only person sitting at one of the litigator's tables before the Justices whose personal life is at stake, given what the arguments are and how these arguments play out. What does that feel like? Does it feel like a burden? Does it feel like an opportunity? Does it make you nervous? Does it make you, I don't know.

Luis Cortes:
Yeah, it kind of depends what hat I'm wearing. As a lawyer, I am very stoked about it. I didn't think that I would have a Supreme Court case this early on in my career. And so I'm very excited to be, not just in the court but at the litigator's table. So it's very daunting. The nine people who are going to be hearing the case and who I'll be looking at them, and they'll be looking at me is, they're going to have a tremendous impact on my life. And they're the ones who get to decide whether my clients are deported and me with them.

Jonathan Blitzer:
Do you have faith in those nine faces you'll be staring at?

Luis Cortes:
I have to. One of the things that I have learned as a lawyer is that in what makes I think the U.S. significantly different from any other country, is its court system and its ability to do the right thing, the just thing when there's injustice done. And this, although it's imperfect, this country has an amazing history of doing that.

David Remnick:
Staff writer Jonathan Blitzer spoke with Luis Cortes and Ted Olson. The Supreme Court's decision on the cancellation of DACA is expected this month. We're going to close the show with the writer Bryan Washington. Brian is a fiction writer and an essayist. And you can also find some of his food videos at newyorker.com. He's a hell of a cook. Recently, Bryan has been writing about living through the pandemic in his hometown of Houston. Here's Bryan Washington.

Bryan Washington:
On my last trip to a gay bar for the foreseeable future, my boyfriend and I played Jenga on a sofa outside. I pulled a piece from a nook, he slid one from a cranny. A bachelor party was next to us and eventually someone ran into our tower of blocks. Immediately, 15 pairs of hands, all of them various shades, stooped to gather the pieces. Our fingers touch from time to time, grazing wrists, and we laughed about the touching, didn't think twice.

Bryan Washington:
Another time in Austin, we found a gay bar on nothing Saturday night. There was no reason for the place to be packed from wall to wall with people breathing all over one another. Sweating and pulsing and winding and shoving but it was, we were. We were a blob of gas and air. At one point I elbowed the guy shaking beside me and after I apologized, he touched my ear and said it was fine.

Bryan Washington:
One night, at a gay bar in Houston, I watched a group of guys huddled around a man who was flailing his hands, tickling the Christmas lights hanging above him. He looked maybe 40, he'd just come out. His friend stood beside him reigning the guy in, asking passersby to give him a kiss on the cheek to celebrate. A loose line formed beside them, ebbing and flowing with the music, congratulating and patting and chanting as though we'd all just won some championship.

Bryan Washington:
One night a few days after the Pulse shooting, I sat in an Atlanta gay bar where nobody said anything at all. Instead, we touched the small of one another's back in passing and gently squeezed every neighboring shoulder.

Bryan Washington:
One night in New Orleans, I sat with a straight friend who had never been to a gay bar before. We vaped on the balcony, and he noted the physical proximity of the space. "Everyone stands so fucking close," he said. Just then, a man slipped between us, cupping our elbows, not even looking at us.

Bryan Washington:
It's worth wondering how a space largely free of threats evolves when every space becomes a threat. It's worth wondering what the function of these spaces is and whether they'll survive and what their survival will mean as the nature of physical space continues to change. Some of us waited a long time for those spaces, some might not mind waiting a bit longer. Some of us don't have time to wait. You miss it when it's gone.

Bryan Washington:
But before everything changed, there was one night walking back to our car from a gay bar in Houston, when we skipped along the broken sidewalk, buzzed on proximity and beer and chilaquiles. Turning the corner we ran into a guy staggering back to his own car with his own people. We hugged in the street. Apologized, kissed one another's cheeks. We said, "Sorry, thank you, love you, be safe, goodbye."

David Remnick:
Bryan Washington in Houston, his novel Memorial is coming out later this year. And you can find a lot more of his work at newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick. And that's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. You can subscribe to the podcast of the show. And you could always find us at newyorkerradio.org. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.

Speaker 3:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Botein, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, KalaLea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Ngofeen Mputubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michele Moses and Steven Valentino. With help from Alison MacAdam, Morgan Flannery, Mengfei Chen and Emily Mann.

Speaker 26:
With additional help from Kylie Warner.

Speaker 3:
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

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