In the finale of our first season, Tali talks to Congressman-elect Ritchie Torres and civil rights leader Ben Jealous about gleaning wisdom from our personal histories and leading with hope. Plus: surprise musical guests!
Hearing will return for Season 2 on January 21st, 2021.
This podcast is paid for by New Yorkers for Tali. To learn more about Tali's campaign for Manhattan DA, please visit http://taliforda.com.
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You know, for me, the starting point for all of us is lived experience. You know, what we believe in values often a product of our lived experience. I'm Tally far Haitian Weinstein, and this is Hearing. You just heard the voice of Richie Torres, Congressman elect from the fifteenth District of New York, better known as the South Bronx. I was talking to Ritchie recently, but how is life informs his work? Because the relationship between lived experience and leadership has been on my mind a lot lately. As you may recall, I started this podcast by talking about my family's story of arriving in the United States from Iran on Christmas Eve back in nineteen seventy nine. And since this episode marks the finale of our first season of Hearing, with Christmas Eve of twenty twenty fast approaching, I've been reflecting on the role our story has played in my campaign for Manhattan DA and how it might inform my work if I'm elected. You've heard me talk a lot on the show about being new to politics and how bizarre it is to navigate the confusing waters of campaigning for the first time. For example, I want to make people feel confident that I'm tough enough to be their protector. But it's also important to me that marginalized and underprivileged communities in our city understand that I know what it means to feel vulnerable, and that I bring a sense of empathy, sensitivity, and nuance to my vision for law enforcement. That's a tough balance for any candidate, and when you add being a woman and an immigrant to the mix, it becomes even trickier. Over the course of this first season, we've talked about how these complex dynamics play out when it comes to issues ranging from racial justice, to gun violence, to domestic violence to the court system. And that's barely scratching the surface of the various elements of our criminal justice system that are in dire need of reform. Thank goodness, we have a second season of the show coming your way in January. And on top of all that, there's the fact that we are experiencing a crisis of faith in political institutions. More broadly, there is intense and justifiable scrutiny on the DA's office to evolve in order to meet this moment of moral uprising. As I head into the next stretch of this campaign, the stakes of balancing safety, fairness, and equity couldn't be higher. And yet, at the end of the day, alongside these enormous challenges, I keep coming back to the fact that ultimately the core of this campaign is telling voters about me, my voice, my vision. And so today I'm talking to two leaders who have channeled their own unique perspectives into the fight for meaningful change. Later in the show, i'll talk to civil rights leader Ben Jellis, but we're going to start with that conversation. I had the city councilman Richie Torres, who was elected to the US House of Representatives just as past November. I've heard you say that when you are a public official, you have an obligation to tell your personal story, and I thought we might just start by asking you what role your personal story has played in your decision to run for office, and how its just shaped your ambitions for what you want to do for the communities that you serve. I was born bread and battle tested in the Bronx. I was raised by a single mother who had to raise three children. I'm minimum wage, which in the nineteen nineties was four dollars and twenty five cents, and I grew up in public housing, living in conditions of bold and mildew leaks and lead, without reliable He didn't have water. I often tell people my life is something of a metaphor, because I grew up in a public housing development right across the street from what eventually became Trump Golf Course, and as I saw the conditions in my own home get worse, the government had invested more than one hundred billion dollars in a golf course named after Donald Trump. And I remember wondering to myself at the time, what does it say about our society that we're willing to invest more in a golf course than in the homes of the lowest income New Yorkers? And eventually I took the leap of faith and ran from public office. I was twenty four, openly gay, and a relatively conservative county. I have no ties to the political establishment or the dynasties of brons politics. But I was a young and energetic organizer, and I knocked on thousands of doors. I went into people's homes, I heard their stories. I remember one voter you're telling me. In the forty years I've been living here, I've never had a candidate for public office or a public official knock on my door. I became the first openly LGBTQ elected official from the Bronx. But what's remarkable is that seven years before then, I was at the lowest point in my life. I had dropped out of college, I had abused substances, I was struggling with depression. There were even moments when I thought of taking my own life. And now I'm about to become a United States Congressman. I often tell people my story is the story of the Bronx. It's a story of struggle, but it's also one of overcoming ritchie. It takes so much courage to be so vulnerable and in such a public way and to integrate it into your leadership. Is it hard for you to do that? No, I see it as a form of coming out. Part of what it means to be LGBTQ is you need to summon the courage to communicate who you are to the world. You have to go through a process of coming out. And I would argue that process not only applies to one sexual identity, it applies to every fact of our lives. You know, I feel I have an obligation to be open about my struggles with depression. Because it's a public figure. I'm in a position to rate the stigma and shame and silence that so often surrounds mental illness. And part of what we do is inspirational. If I can inspire people to embrace who they are or to feel like they can see themselves in their elected leadership, I think that's an important part of what elected officials do. I've heard it said, you know so many elected officials and you know leaders say those closest to the pain should be the closest to the power. Is that something that you embrace? I mean it sounds like you do. I do, because when I think about the greatest challenges of affecting the self proms and the poorest parts of our country, whether it's food in security and housing insecurity, these are not simply abstractions that I've studied intense as a policy maker. These are struggles that I've lived in my own life. Well, so I'll tell you something that I'm struggling with in terms of this very question. Because while certainly my journey has had moments of pain and I'm learning to be vulnerable about them, I mean, these are things that we my parents had actually encouraged me not to talk about. You talk about your mom earning four to twenty five an hour at the minimum wage. I went back and looked at our immigration file and my mom's first job in this country, working as a teller at City Bank. She was getting paid three dollars an hour, and she was grateful to have that job. Right, But I think I'm not living so close to the pain anymore. My life has changed so much, and I wrestle with this. Does it? Do you think it gives me a lesser claim in understanding what the people I hope to represent are going through and on being able to deliver for them. No, you know, well, first, I think the pain that you had to experience in your childhood is relevant. Like am I. I'm not presently living public housing? But the pain that I and the trauma that I had to face in my childhood had lasting consequences on me and helped shaint the person I ultimately became. You know, none of these are like absolute rules, right. It's it's not necessarily the case that those who have lived experience are destined to be great public servants. But I do think lived experience can be a source of wisdom. Yeah, And you know, I don't think that there is such a thing in a place as diverse as New York City as sort of a representative experience and what we want our ways to reach past wherever we find ourselves in a current moment. And often our history is the best place to draw on for that. But it could be other things. But I do worry about this, and I think it's worth talking about. And I you know, I wonder for you, as your life changes, how are you going to hold on to who you are and where you came from. I mean, you're packing your bags now, you're on your way to Washington. Do you think about this? How to stay connected? Look, my mother taught me the most important lesson, never forget where you come from. And I got my start as a housing organizer, a council staffer, and for me, constituent service as a religion. When I first became the chair of the committee that oversaw the New York City Housing Authority of public Housing, I said to myself, instead of holding a hearing in the chambers of City Hall, why not bring government directly to the people. Why not hold a public housing here in any public housing development, and why not give the tenants themselves a platform on which to tell their stories. And during the hearing, one senior citizen testified that she was so cold in her apartment that she left her up and on, risking death from a monoxide exposure, simply so that she could get heat. And I just felt like a story like that just captures the sense of desperation that's unfolding and public housing in New York City. I think a lot about I'll just say quickly about the physical location of the DA's office and how far away it is from the experiences with so many people that you know and communities it is supposed to understand. And I don't know what the answer to that is. What I'm thinking about it remain connected to the grassroots, because yeah, when you're an elected official, the trappings of power can be seductive and you can easily lose touch. Part of why I'm looking to speak with elected officials as I make my way into politics for the first time is I find that something about running for office feels kind of demented, and I wind up talking about myself more than I'm comfortable and more than I'm used to, and sort of lose a private sense of myself and I want advice from you. How do you keep something separate? Look, I hope, yeah, I hope that it's possible to tell a story about yourself without descending into narcissism. You know, I do believe you know. Policy matters, but I think the goal is not to tell your personal story to the exclusion of policy. The goal is to integrate policy into a personal story, is to humanize it. Politics is every bit as visceral as it is cerebral. People want to have a visceral sense that you're one of us and you're going to fight for us. The human connection, the personal story matters. And again, I'm not suggesting that identity of politics is everything, right, but I have identities to which people can connect. Random back, I'm Latino, I'm LGBTQ, I'm the son of the Bronx, I'm a millennial. Having said that, how as an elected official should be judged by the actual progress that I read in the lives of the people I represent. I think the problem with our politics is that we overvalue ideological virtue signaling yes, and undervalue actual substance, actual competence. Like our politics is more performative than substantive, and it's nauseating. You know. We started our conversation talking about how to campaign, how to tell your story, how to connect to the stories of others. But all of that is to just lay a groundwork for exactly what you've talked about. And maybe maybe all of us are just, you know, fall victim to a system that, as you say, puts too much emphasis on the getting to the office and not on what you do in the office. Look, you have to ignore the stupidity swirling around you and just be who you are, be true to yourself. You know, for me, integrity is not only good morals, it's also good hold. Of course, one of the other factors whirling around this campaign is the sense of doom and distress the four years of Donald Trump's presidency fostered at every level of our political system. It's always a struggle to convince people that you can lead them out of the darkness, but it's particularly difficult when so many have accepted darkness as the new normal. So I sat down with my old friend, an eternal optimist civil rights leader, Ben Jealous, the former president of the NAACP and the current president of People for the American way come from two old American families. My mom descends from Thomas Jefferson's grandmother by her other grandchildren that were her slaves, and my father descends from seven soldiers in the Revolutionary War, including the youngest combatant, the only child soldier at the Battle of Lexington and conquered. And when you grow up in one of those families, on both sides, there's a real sense of ownership over our democracy and the experiment that is the world's oldest democracy. My mom also descends from two black men who were black statesmen who are statesmen during the reconstruction era in Virginia, So they weren't founders of the country. They were very much builders and rebuilders of the country. And it can be easy in the country that's now hundreds of millions of people and stretches from coast to coast to lose sight of the fact that we all own this country. We're all responsible for it. It is a bold experiment and we all get to shape it. Yeah, and I appreciate so much, Ben that you immediately go to a definition of what it means to be American that is so personal and for you is so rooted. I mean, I listened to you, and I find it particularly interesting that you are now at the helm of an organization that is about the American Way. So tell me what does the American way mean? For Ben Jealous? It was funny my brother in law, he's a Feldman. His family showed up at Ellis Island as Mesa and came out as Feldman, and the jokes is that it was Friday. The ugly part of that is that apparently Messa didn't sounds sufficiently Jewish, and they wanted to give him an ethnic marker, so they gave him a Jewish sounding name, which was Feldman. If they were going to take up the cause of improving names at Ellis Island, they totally could have improved Jealous, Like, right, we didn't need to be We showed up with one of the seven Deadly Sins. We didn't have to leave with it. But I had to say that, you know, I think with Jesse Jackson used to always say, we all came over here in different boats, but we're in the same boat now. And that's the point in a democracy, like we work best when we're all pulling an oar, when we all feel like we have the agency to move the boat, to set the direction. And it makes me shudder to hear conversations about the death of the republic and this notion that the experiment is over and that that's like a real conversation that's happening in our country, and it's a time, I believe, when we have to really ask ourselves, not just who are we and who have we been? Who do we want to be? So, Ben, let's connect that to conversations that you and I have had, particularly around criminal justice, but more broadly about what it means to bring people along and to connect to them in pursuing the goals that you've described. Because you know, as you know right now, I'm engaged in a political campaign in a Democratic primary, and I find, you know, in a way that is reflective of some of what we're hearing across the country. There's a real nihilism in the way that people who are coming rightfully from a place of frustration and want and really anger over layers upon layers of injustice wind up to me speaking in a way that is not particularly productive or solution oriented. I mean, in my little world, I find that, you know, people are running against the very idea of law enforcement and just sort of want to take it down rather than to say, well, this power, it exists. It exists for a reason. Here is a way that we can use it that connects back to the idea of all of us being in the same boat, or all of us being our brothers and sisters keeper as we shortly are. And I wonder, is your sort of positivity out of step with what you're hearing. Do you feel attention between some of what you're hearing from your comrades and how you are trying to lead at people for the American way. What my grandmother would say, is it baby, never forget it's always darkest before the dawn. And so anybody who's coming to you and saying it's dark, it's dark, it's talking. Oh my god, there's so much darkness, they're absolutely right. And yet it's also absolutely correct to say to them, better times our head. We will get there. We actually get to decide how fast we get there. The faster that we can work together, the faster that we can agree on a destination, the faster that we can build our power, the faster we get there. And so, yeah, my grandmother, I think takes it even deeper. I mean, this is a woman who carries with her two hundred years of American history, lived in whole firsthand. Her grandparents and grandparents were all born slaves. My grandmother graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in fifty three, so before Brown commuting up from the tenements of West Baltimore the train that my granddad worked as a dishwasher. And my grandma would tell you, just like sociologically, if we were in the midst of a moment when those who are most invested in the old warder of white supremacy knew that they were running out of time, you expect them to alert way to the right and begin acting like a cornered fox in this moment, And yet every moment passes. I hear you talk about the darkness, Ben, and I also know that you have said that people are like squid they moved to the light, which is a metaphor. I don't fully understand the squid part, but I please do. I think I understand the light part, and I hear it shining through this podcast the six Ocean Aga. He was listening to this call of oh yeah, that's right, Yeah, so you know I'm that. You know I'm the nation's youngest retired I guess now reactivated civil rights leader. Right, I was president LACP at thirty five. I also, when I was thirteen was the youngest still think held the record is the youngest tour guid in the history of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Every day I'm more and more impressed with I just I don't think the forest gump of politics. So he even goes back to a shrimp boat somewhere. There's always a shrimp boat. But my parents' marriage was against the law in Maryland. They met as school teachers, and so they ultimately sought refuge in California and then would send me back to Baltimore for my cultural training every summer. So my school years were in Monterey Bay, summer was in West Baltimore. Totally different worlds. And on the Monterey Bay in the evenings, the fog rolls in and occasionally you look out and there's these big globes of light, and it looks when you're a kid and you're saying coming from the local, sort of like Opening Night, obviously Close Encounters of the third kind, it looks like you're being invaded by UFOs, and so I said to my dad, Dad, like, what is that out there? There's globes of light floating in the Monterey Bay. They're squid boats. So you don't catch squid with bait, you catch squid with light. And so literally it started with Sicilian fishermen over a hundred years ago in bringing us a technique from Italy to Monterey where you would hang out lantern into the side of your boat and the squid who are relatively near the surface would come and then you'd neap them into the boat. With that said, When I said that, it was in the context of a speech talking about the importance of each of us really choosing that big thing that we're going to change before we die, you know the way that like like you're taking on the justice system, and that's been kind of a shared fascination of ours. You know, how do we really fix the criminal justice assistant? Since we were students going to evensong, yes o, Yes, at Oxford, the first experience with light is like you kind of light that little candle inside yourself. It's like the old spiritual this little light of mind. Nobody else can see it. I mean, they say the human eye can see one candle to mile on the darkness. But you know, like New York City doesn't have any darkness, right, nobody's seeing that lighting side of you. But it's enough to kind of show you the next step and the next step, and then eventually you have such clarity, such singularity of purpose that they say about a great preacher. That's say, you know that brother was on fire today. Yes, And what it means that little lighting side of you has been nurtured by your clarity and your courage and has become so big that nobody can ignore it, and that draws people to you. And you know, I sing that song to my daughters sometimes to help put them to bed, because I can't think of a better ambition for them to be able to start with that little, little, tiny light that nobody else can see. And you know, I go back to where we started this conversation, Ben, and I think that you know you. One of the things I've always appreciated about you is how connected you are to your family history and this awareness that you have that we have swam in darker waters, all of us, or we just experienced an unfairness that send us on a trajectory. You know, my father grew up in Esfahan, in what was effectively a Jewish ghetto inside of this ancient city in Iran, and he couldn't go to school on rainy days because the people thought that whatever it was that contaminated the Jews would wash off of them and get on the non Jews, you know, if it was transmitted by water. So if it rained, he had to stay home or he would get beat up. And it's good to have something to swim away from. I think that you have always understood how to pull people toward the light. But part of what special about the way that you do that is I think you make your vulnerability available. You make it available, and you make it a part of your leadership. I also think that that sounds pretty risky and kind of scary to me, So you know, I'd like to know and almost in a way, to sort of learn from you as I embark on this how you manage you manage that you manage it, particularly for your family and just for your own well being. When of justice and serving others is your life, you have to remember to live and to do the things that make living a joy. So for me, I give two nights a week and one day to my kids, no matter what Friday night, Saturday night, and the time in between. And what I found is that it gives me more energy for the fight, a greater sense of urgency, and keeps me connected. If you've been listening to Hearing from the very beginning, you know that one of the first voices we featured on this show was not a policy expert or a legal scholar, or even someone old enough to vote in the election. It was my daughter, Sabina, And in the spirit of Angelis's advice, I thought it would be fitting to end our first season by checking in with her one more time. So, Sabina, one of the things that we did on this podcast is I shared with the listeners the story of how I came to America, right with Ema and with Uncle Lee, and I thought, you know, maybe you could just talk about what do you think about when you think about your family's story of coming to America. Well, I think it was like a brave of you to come, because it's really hard to come to America and start a new life. And it's also that it was smart to come because it was really dangerous in you run. I also might have been really scary, but I feel like proud that you came. So what's it been like for you to watch me run for district attorney, like something I've never done before. And what have you noticed about how it's affected me? Well, like the way I feel about like seeing you run. It's kind of like interesting because I can learn about like how to run a campaign and have a podcast. But it's also kind of strange because like you've never ran for something before, and I think it's affected you because like this is your first time running for something and it's like a big change and you're working harder, and also it's like it's really you like enjoy it a lot, and you've never really noticed that you would enjoy running for something before. So what did you learn from that? I don't learn from that. Well, like like sometimes you might think, oh, I'm never going to run for something. I don't I wouldn't like it, But then if you actually do it, you actually might like it. Do you think watching Mommy trying to be a leader has made you want to be a leader, either either by running for something or leading in some other way when you grow up? Yeah, Because like I think it's really inspiring that, like, even though it might have been like a little scary, you decided to run, and I might run for something. Then I like hearing that. Do you remember when we first talked about the decision of whether I should run for district Attorney and I said to you, how are you going to feel if I lose? Do you remember what you said to me? I said, I think you're run a whim. But even not, it was good that you tried. Yeah, do you still think that, Like, now that you've seen how much work it is, do you think it's still good to try? Yeah? Okay, you go, and then you'll go after me, promise. Yes, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, this little light of mine. I'm gonna let it shine, this little light of mine. I'm gonna let it shine, Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine altogether. Now, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, Let it shine. Leta Those were Sabina's sisters. Hearing is produced in partnership with Pushkin Industries. This is the finale of our first season, but Hearing will return on January twenty first with more conversations about how to build a justice system that delivers safety, fairness, and justice for all, especially our most vulnerable. Our producers are Sam Dingman and Camille Baptista. Our engineer is Evan Viola. Special thanks to Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. This podcast is paid for by New Yorkers for Tally. I am running to be District Attorney of Manhattan. If you like what you've heard, go to Tali FDA dot com to learn more about my campaign. I'm Tali far Haitian Weinstein. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in January for season two of Hearing.