The following podcast contains explicit language.

Black women are the canaries in the coal mine.

Once you begin permitting law enforcement to invade the hospital where women are being treated,

invade the privacy of family's lives, and to then have precedent before courts

with doing so, then everybody becomes vulnerable to it. It's not just black women, and that's the

story that's being played out now.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus.

This is Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, the Supreme Court, the rule of law in America today.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

I cover some of those things for Slate. And this week's show is part of our summer series that pans back from the Supreme

Court term and brings you fascinating legal thinkers you may not have heard too much about yet.

This week we wanted to talk a little bit more about race, which has pretty quickly emerged in the last few days as the defining issue in the 2020 election. This has been,

one might suggest, the defining issue in every presidential election. It's just that we don't

always say the quiet parts out loud. In addition to the president's recent tweets suggesting

that women of color go back to where they came from. This past weekend saw the president attack

Representative Elijah Cummings in what can, I think, only be described as the most starkly

racist terms. The past week also saw the Supreme Court by a five to four vote lift an injunction,

allowing the president to start work on his signature campaign promise, a wall at the southern border.

And amid all this cacophonous noise and the insults, there also lurks a fight about gender as well,

with the president now swept into more scandals involving women, including accusations from E. Jean Carroll, the fall of Jeffrey Epstein, new reporting around Alan Dershowitz.

It hardly seems an understatement to say that race and gender will be the fault line along which this country tears itself apart before the 2020 election.

And to talk about all that, I reached out to Michelle

...