Young Gifted Black & Disabled: Justice for All
Wednesday, October 12th, 2022
This final season of Reid My Mind Radio 2022 is once again focusing on #YGBD – Young Gifted Black & Disabled. Ever since producing the episode in 2020 under that same name with Ajani AJ Murray, I wanted to make it a seasonal theme.
This opening episode was inspired by my dive into the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler along with real concerns around environmental, social and political upheaval. I wondered how these things could impact the disability community specifically.
I reached out to Justice Shorter; a Disability Justice advocate and Black Disabled Lives Matter amplifier. She is a national expert on disability inclusive disaster protections, emergency management and humanitarian crises/conflicts. And she’s just pretty dope and just someone who we all should be aware of.
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Music begins – A bouncy synth opens a driving Hip Hop beat.
TR:
[megaphone sound effect]
Greetings Reid My Mind Radio family. Welcome back! to the first episode in this final season of 2022. I’m talking about Young, Gifted, Black…
[in the background]
say the word
[yells]
And disabled!
If you don’t know it all began with an episode I produced in 2020 with my man, brother, Ajani AJ Murray. If you haven’t listened to that original episode, I strongly suggest that you do.
I like to begin the episode with some sort of an intro, you know, an update, a skit, a few words loosely tied to the episode or its theme. Well, today’s guest has so much greatness to share that I want to honor that and leave most of this episode to her and the topic at hand. But here, we always kick things off with the drum.
Reid My Mind Radio Intro Music
A collage of different crisis from news reports: 01:07
“We have stormed the Capitol!” A rioter yells!
“To Washington and the high stakes hearings on the January 6 attack on the Capitol.” – News anchor.
“A rally organized to protest COVID restrictions, with members of the state’s militia groups openly taking part” – News Reporter.
“Longer fire seasons, stronger hurricanes, more intense heat waves and floods. Across the world climate events are getting more extreme” – News anchor
“If it feels to you like there are more weather related natural disasters. That’s not just a feeling.” – News reporter
TR:
All of these things are taking place around us today and are increasing in occurrence. And my recent dive into the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler, and it really got me thinking how prepared are we people with disabilities for major disaster? Then I recall meeting someone on Clubhouse who can really speak to this in a way that truly takes this all into account.
— Music begins, Triumphant horns blow as a symbol crescendos into a mid tempo Hip Hop beat lead by a driving kick drum.
Justice Shorter
Justice:
I am a black blind lesbian woman. I hail from the Midwest Region born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but I currently reside in Washington DC.
I am the granddaughter of Leola Daniels Carter and Fanny Jahari. I’m the daughter of Lily Mae Carter and Michael Demetrius Shorter. It’s always top of mind for me to link and give honor to the lineages in terms of the work that I do, the spaces that we occupy.
I describe myself as a curator, as a creative, a coordinator of sorts. I am a disability justice advocate a Black Disabled Lives matter amplifier, a international trainer and speaker.
I do a lot of work that heavily focuses on disaster, justice, disability justice, racial justice, gender justice work, because they are inextricably linked, you cannot have one without having the other.
A lot of my work kind of centers around those primary issues. Iadjusted and adapted as I continue learning and growing and evolving because quite frankly, there is no other way for me to move and maneuver in this world.
TR:
A part of that learning, growing, evolving is in regards to her blindness. This began with glaucoma around the age of five or six.
Justice:
That actually first started out with a retinal detachment which took all of the vision in my right eye. Then glaucoma slowly started to take the vision and my left eye. From very early ages, it has informed my life. So it would be categorized as a developmental disability for sure. Given how it has informed my developmental years, my early developing years.
My relationship to disability, though, is one that has come with the progression of time as well. I have always been deeply steeped in my blackness. But coming into a closeness and intimacy with disability has been something that has happened over time.
TR:
I’m sure there are a lot of people with intersecting identities who are adjusting to disability that can relate.
BIPOC, or a ter that better encapsulates this group, people of the global majority, who may have spent years learning how to deal with overt racism, microaggressions and all sorts of injustice, while trying to develop a strong and positive self identity. Only to have to now be faced with internal and external ableism.
Justice:
It wasn’t until I started to delve more deeply into the work of quite frankly, people of color with disabilities, that I started to see myself more clearly and I started to smile and rejoice of what that was reflected back to me.
To see yourself mirrored and the experiences of other people who have similar journeys as you do, really helps you to getting a better understanding of how you can position yourself in this community and in this space.
So it wasn’t until I started reading folks like Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Patty Burns, Stacy Park Milburn folks who, again, are luminaries in the space of Disability Justice articulators and architects of what we now know as disability justice. That I was really able to grab hold to it in a way that was so deeply personal, and that encompassed such a profound sense of pride.
TR:
We’re talking about the power of people and our stories, enabling us to fully see ourselves and explore all of those things that make up who we are.
Justice:
I had already realized quite early on that standing in my truth was a means of survival. It was a means of me utilizing my own story, as opposed to having others use it for themselves. What does my story mean, not only to myself, but other young women like me, other Black lives, LGBTQIA, folks just like myself, other people of color, like myself with disabilities, it wasn’t until I started to think about that a bit more that I was far more inclined to start working on disability as an area of practice.
TR:
Part of that process can literally require finding the right location, a place that presents opportunities for justice, and then moving to Washington, DC.
Justice
I came out to DC, the doors kept opening and they were all related to disability. There were a lot of internships and practicum opportunities and all of that stuff. And all of them were like disability oriented opportunities. And I’m like, well, here we go, I’m not gonna turn down this internship I’ve been dreaming up or this post grad school job that I’ve been dreaming of, because it’s in the disability space, and I didn’t want to be held in a box. I was very scared for quite some time that disability would cage me. I say that with purpose. I say that with intention. So many of us are caged because of our disability.
TR:
Cages are more than physical, a boundary that limits our movement. Well, that can be in our thinking about our lives and possibility.
Justice:
Considering how many people of color, how many black people are imprisoned in this country, and how many of them have some sort of disability, mental health consideration, or access or functional issues.
I think about trying to do this work in the different layers of discrimination that happens when you say that you have a disability and you’re trying to find a job, I did not want to be pushed aside, I did not want to be pushed out of the different sectors that I wanted to pursue professionally. The opposite happened. The very thing that you think will cage you can sometimes be the thing that frees you. It became the thing that allowed me to see myself more clearly, allowed me to grow wings, in a sense of flying in all of these different directions and with all of these other phenomenal people who are also doing dope stuff being completely embodied in their truth, and that should just excited me to know him.
TR:
When I first began making audio even before this podcast, I thought about working in radio and reading mainstream stories. I recall thinking,
[faintly]
I’m more than just disability.
[back to normal speech]
When I hear Justice say…
Justice
The very thing that you think will cage you can sometimes be the thing that frees you.
TR:
… Learning more about disability culture and challenging my own ableism has brought me to a place where I realized the opportunity and value in telling stories from a disability lens. In no way am I settling for something less rather, I’m fully aware of his greatness and possibility.
Justice:
A lot of folks have distanced themselves from the word disability as a means of survival. That history is the interlocking ways that people have been discriminated against all of those forms of compounded discrimination has caused many folks to distance themselves, whether it be locking you out of the school systems, locking you out of the employment system, locking you out of the type of medical care that you need, locking you out of the type of housing that you need, actually locking you into nursing homes, psychiatric facilities, group homes, settings that you don’t wish to be in. People with disabilities have an acute awareness of these things. It has caused folks to quite honestly try to be very fearful about the proximity of disability, kind of getting too close to that word, or getting too close to those issues. That should not be the reality that we all live in.
TR:
You know this isn’t about the word disabled, right? Many prefer to use terms like “special needs” or “differently abled,” but that doesn’t change the impact of systemic ableism.
Justice:
And that is why it’s so deeply important that we change those structural inequities that people have to deal with on a day to day basis, so that people can, people of color with disabilities, young and old, of any age range, any type of disability can hear that word and understand that it is inseparable with freedom. It is inseparable from joy. It is inseparable from laughter, and levity and friendship and fellowship, all of the things that allows your soul to breathe. That’s kind of what I try to center my work on as much as I can.
TR:
Building bridges for us. Our wellbeing physical, emotional, spiritual. We’re talking about our safety and you know, that goes beyond natural threats.
Justice10:00
There’s also human-caused crises that we have to contend with: the Flint water crisis, things that are happening with the nuclear power plants, factories that pollute water, you think about environmental injustice, which also, of course leads you to the Environmental Justice Movement, which was founded by people of color. A lot of times that history gets pushed aside or buried, when we talk about environmental justice.
TR: 10:24
Whether man made or natural, these threats to our safety don’t always just spring up on us.
Justice10:30
Dealing with structural violence on a day to day basis. Also, it creates what people in the social work and psychology world call the sandpaper versus baseball effects. The baseball effect is when something hits you over the head, it’s kind of very hard. It’s a hard hitting issue that evokes this trauma. But then there’s also the sandpaper effect, which is trauma that things that grate on you over time, it kind of wears you down wears on you over time, things like poverty, not being fully represented, not only in terms of your politics, but also in terms of these social environments that you navigate within things like medicalized ableism. And discrimination, all of these things wear on you, over time, all of these things are structurally violent, it is the difference between your potential reality and your actual conditions.
TR:
Too often individuals are held up as an example to model “he overcame the poverty,” “she broke through the glass ceiling.” Whether we’re talking about racism, sexism, ableism, we hear it all the time, “she was able to do it, why can’t the rest of you?” But focusing on individuals does nothing to address the systemic problem.
Justice:
We as people of color with disabilities, we have the potential certainly to pursue whatever aspirations that we want to pursue in terms of professional or academic or spiritual. And yet, so many of us are kept out of those areas of those sectors for all sorts of reasons, but many of them tie back to racism, ableism, sexism, ageism, so on and so forth. All of those things are structurally violent, because it keeps you from living the life that you could live.
Toni Morrison tells us that racism itself is just a distraction. It keeps you from living the life that you truly wish to live. It keeps you from doing the things that you truly wish to do, because you are in a perpetual space of having to explain your very existence to people who quite frankly, may or may not even give a damn at the end of the day.
TR: 12:31
That’s fighting for employment that enables you to earn a living wage in order to afford housing where you don’t have to worry about your children getting lead poisoning, or access to good schools or even clean drinking water. And then there’s something we really need to consider in regards to the often suggested advice around disaster preparedness.
Justice 12:50
So many individuals who are impacted by disaster or who live in disaster prone areas are told to simply prepare, to pack up as much stuff as you can pack up, hoard as much stuff as you can hoard. Have you a to-go bag that’s filled with all of these things that you can afford to put in it. But if you cannot afford these things during times that are not embodied by crisis, then you certainly can’t afford them enough to stock up on them prior to a crisis. Are we sculpting solutions and recommendations based on the conditions that only a select few can meet? Or are we creating solutions and ideologies, remedies and practices that are going to be applicable for the people who need them the most.
TR: 13:36
As Justice simply put it, preparation comes with privilege. If you do have that privilege, by all means, consider checking out various suggestions on what to include in an emergency to go kit. Ready.gov has a number of suggestions. As people with disabilities you also want to consider your access needs like white or mobility canes, assistive technology, and other technology that may be required for you to gather information or communicate with others. However, it’s important to note that the onus shouldn’t always be placed on the individual.
Justice:
It’s kind of the wave in the finger in the face response.” Why didn’t you prepare better, we can’t always save everybody!”
People deserve to survive irrespective of what their class status is. My thinking around this has shifted. I go more towards how are we building community and connection. Whereas I may only be able to buy a flashlight, my neighbor up the street may be able to buy a couple of extra cases of water. My other neighbor down the road may have a generator. My other neighbor down the street may have a couple of more cans of food. Can we create community in this way? Disability Justice teaches us that we are each other’s survival strategy.
Music begins – a smooth slow jazzy Hip Hop groove.
TR: 14:46
This feels like the antithesis of our society’s norm contrary to the idea of independent making sure you have your own solely relying on yourself. This is interdependence. We spoken about this here before and up approach that encourages collaborative work.
Justice 15:02
coming back to center around community, how can we help each other survive? What I can’t carry, maybe you can. What you can’t do, maybe I can? How can we support each other?
TR: 15:14
Another term for this way of acting and thinking is mutual aid.
Justice 15:18
It’s looking at this in a way that says, even if you cannot contribute in these ways that kind of meet other material needs, your life is still worth saving.
How can we support in that way? That could be any of us at any time, that is also a means of planning for the future. I don’t have this disability today, I may have it in two months, or if something hits me in a certain way, I could have that mobility disability.
So us planning around how we’re going to support these folks in our community, now, it’s important for all of our collective survival.
TR:
Perhaps this goes beyond the physical.
Justice:
Cole Arthur Reilly, who has this wonderful book called This Year Flesh. In that book, Cole says, What if God did not just want to use you? What if he also wanted to be with you? I think about that, in terms of people having inherent worth and recognizing wholeness, which is one of those disability justice principles. We recognize the wholeness of people, we understand that there doesn’t have to be a utility. In order for people to survive catastrophe. We could just inherently care about the presence and the value of each other as people. And that could be enough to make us think about preparedness in a more expansive way. That recognizes that all of us deserve the opportunity to survive.
TR: 16:31
With that said, what exactly are some examples of mutual aid that exists today?
Justice 16:36
Mask Oakland, because they have done extraordinary work to help protect people with disabilities during wildfire seasons by making sure that people had masks to help themselves to breathe during the wildfires of California. These are people with disabilities helping other people with disabilities by supplying them with masks.
They also had a very targeted approach in terms of helping people who were houseless because they were the folks who were the most exposed. People who can go indoors and shut the windows and use central air units to stay cool and protect themselves from the air.
TR: 17:06
How often do we hear the narrative of people with disabilities as recipients of aid? Rarely do we hear of us as providers, especially when it goes beyond the disability community. But check out who stepped up when the pandemic hit and the rush on masks resulted in a shortage.
Justice 17:23
Oakland had masks that they were trying to distribute at the very least when supplies were running low.
Providing people with information on what types of masks to get and what type of masks did what, and making sure that people were willing to know. So that informational awareness was key.
This is also something that a lot of folks are doing online, in terms of telling people different ways to stay safe. And all of these different COVID protocols, people sharing knowledge on how to save themselves.
This is also happening in kind of non-crisis wave people with disabilities creating hashtags and creating websites around disability at home. What are some of the hacks that people are making? I think that’s actually the site’s name, “disability at home.”
TR: 18:00
Disabilityathome dot ORG, a catalog, if you will, of ideas and inexpensive hacks that enable people to create low cost solutions for mobility aids In Home Solutions for creating safe, accessible spaces in bathrooms, and for completing daily chores at home. As Justice noted, the same things that keep you safe on a daily basis are needed during disasters. So providing information is a component of disaster justice, to activism and advocacy, a real and important function that just so happens to be accessible for those with disabilities.
Justice 18:36
Sometimes when we talk about activism, we try to only act as if that can happen in ways that are very physical, being in the street, going up against police officers going out there and directly helping someone evacuate carrying them on your back out of the flaming building, right?
When we think about that, as forms of support, or activism, or things that would kind of constitute this framing around who is a responder or who is someone we can call in a crisis related event. But there is also a ton of work that’s happening in virtual spaces and online. And that’s really key, especially for many of us who can’t physically go out and beat the streets by way of protesting or going door to door to advocate for the things that people need.
TR: 19:24
We’re talking about all sorts of things here from crises like that in Flint, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi, that deprive people of clean drinking water, health care, access to physical and online spaces. A lot of that’s happening through hashtags, some of these online Twitter spaces and Facebook groups.
Justice 19:43
This is important because that’s how knowledge is passed. So many of us are learning through the lessons of others and through the lives of others. And when you share that information, it positions people with disabilities as experts of their own narratives, but also of their own survival. And I think that’s really important.
TR: 20:01
When talking about survival, Justice stresses that it goes beyond the high profile weather events.
Justice 20:07
What you might not consider to be a crisis, I would! The fact that there are people who might be doing construction in your building, and they don’t tell the blind folks what’s happening, it’s not a crisis for anybody else moving around that building, except if I hit that ladder.
People with disabilities have additional considerations that we’re thinking about on a day to day basis, it may not be a crisis as someone else, oh, I just have a scratch. But for me, it could take me out for days, or it could take me out for much longer than that. I think about that and I affirm those experiences for people.
TR: 20:37
Okay, now check out this example of mutual aid, Justice knows neighbors, and they know her. Even more than that, they look out for one another. So when Justice isn’t around, a neighbor will say something to a construction worker, like…
Justice 20:50
“You cannot leave that ladder here, you can, you cannot leave all of these tools in the middle of the floor because the cane may not catch it.”
TR: 20:58
Then I think it’s solely about themselves, but rather, each other, community, like a time a man with a knife tried to enter the building.
Justice21:06
The neighbors came together and supported one another and they made sure he did not get in here.
I had another neighbor who was locked outside of our building, the door knob literally came off, so we couldn’t get out. And he could not get in. What was my solution? My first solution was not to call the police because all of us were black. Two of them were black men. And there’s some additional considerations that you have to take into account in that way. The first thing that I thought of though was to go grab this neighbor of the black men, he came down, he literally undid all of the joints to get that thing undone so that we could all get out of the building. And so this guy could get in.
TR: 21:39
Together, they took action that would prevent such a crisis in the future.
Justice 21:43
We advocated that a new door be put on to the building, we advocated that the construction crew close the windows at night, so that different people didn’t have access into the building, which created another safety concern.
TR: 21:54
The lesson here, any conversation about disaster preparedness must be about advocacy.
Justice 21:59
I encourage you to start talking to the people around you making community with the people around you. I encourage you to start looking around you and assessing kind of what are the things that you can do if you are spending your time at a workplace and eight hours out of your life, every single day, Monday through Friday. And then okay, I think we need an evacuation chair, where is it because how am I going to get out and it’s not just acceptable that everybody else can leave except me. That’s not cool. I’m not okay that that is our plan, or that our plan is this only one person knows how to use the evacuation chair, and nobody else knows how to use it. So if Rob is not at work today, then it’s just too bad for me if a crisis happens on that day,
TR: 22:36
Justice recommends thinking about all of the places you spend time, community centers, public parks and malls for all sorts of crises. In 2022, the reality includes acts of insurrection homegrown terrorism, thinking about mass shootings, do you have an escape route, or no have a way to shelter in place? These are just some of the questions we should be asking ourselves.
Justice 22:58
How can we use things like vocational rehabilitation services, assistive technology organizations that say, Hey, I think I need this piece of assistive tech because it’s going to help me in a crisis. I’m going to use it for dual purposes. I’m going to use it on my day to day but it’s certainly going to be useful as something to support me during a crisis as well.
TR: 23:14
How does geography play into preparation? Specifically, I’m thinking about those living in rural environments far from their nearest neighbor.
Justice 23:22
I think sometimes that gives you the illusion that there’s no community because people aren’t close. And that’s an untruth. Many of them have way more survival techniques that any of us would even understand because they have had to live on their own. And because they haven’t had easy access to just go down the street and get to someone.
Listen, when the cold snap happened down in Mississippi, it was 2020 or 2021. All the years are running together. When the cold snap came into those areas. A lot of black folks who lived in very rural areas mentioned how “Listen, we didn’t have any running water,” “our generator started to go out,” “there was no one around us for miles, we had to figure out how we were going to get from point A to point B.”
What ended up happening, you still have people who ended up driving in, you still had people who ended up starting to bring people over to their homes so that they can have baths. You had people who were doing carpools that make sure that people had access to food and water. People showed up for one another.
TR: 24:19
Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone. Justice encourages organizations to really think about this, especially when making new purchases.
Justice 24:27
If we’re getting new vans, if we’re getting new buses, are they wheelchair accessible? Those very same church buses, vans, these things are also becoming evacuation vehicles in a crisis. Are they equipped with a wheelchair lift? If they not, we have a problem. We’re not planning for everybody. You’re saying that everybody else can get on this bus that we have repurposed to be you know, an evacuation, but we’re gonna go up this road and we’re gonna get everybody who want to come. Wonderful. What if I want to come and I can’t because there’s no way for me to get on this bus with my power chair. You can’t just put me on there and then I have no means of moving around once I get to my location.
TR in Conversation with Justice: 25:03
Yeah, absolutely.
Justice 25:05
When I first started to lose my sight, and I started taking courses that were related to activities of daily living, my instructor was also a blind woman. And she said that the difference between a problem and a crisis is time.
TR: 25:14
Remember that situation where the door to Justice’s building couldn’t open. That was a problem. But when you add fire and smoke, it becomes a crisis, the tenants working together that makes that building a community. Churches, social organizations, and even chapters of consumer organizations are all opportunities for mutual aid organizing.
Justice 25:35
I would also beg the leadership of those entities to consider how they are thinking of their whole community, how they’re thinking of people with disabilities, because like I said, we will make investments in certain things. But are those things accessible from the onset? Is it something that we have to complain about or somebody gets hurt or somebody gets left out, then we start to consider it. “Oh, wow, we had to leave Miss Jenkins at home, hope she’s okay when the waters was rising, because nobody had a vehicle that could get her out.” But this is our community, we love it. But yet we didn’t plan for Miss Jenkins.
TR: 26:06
For those who may think they don’t have any access to community, that online access can prove to be helpful in various ways.
Justice 26:13
Even by listening to a podcast like this is cultivating a connection with different streams of thought from other people. That also helps to decrease isolation, and also helps you kind of just learn different patterns and different practices that might be helpful for you.
I could get on these types of platforms and talk from sunup to sundown, and I still wouldn’t be able to give you a fraction of all that goes into doing disaster justice and Disability Justice work.
What we could do is build together and create a relationship so that we can stretch out as much as we can in terms of helping people to understand what will be the most useful for them. What is necessary for me as a blind woman is not going to be the same for somebody with a different type of mobility disability, we have to individualize our responses a bit more, as opposed to just saying people with disabilities need to do a better job of packing a bag and going.
TR: 27:08
This episode began with the idea of becoming more prepared in the event of an emergency, it evolved into a broader understanding of a more holistic approach to mitigating disasters. That is disaster justice.
Justice 27:21
Thinking about all of the different ways that people are impacted by disasters across a disaster cycle. So it’s not just during response, but it’s also during the preparedness stage. It is during the mitigation phase, it is during response, during recovery. It’s long term recovery. Recovery does not end when the cameras school, when
Are we thinking about this in terms of people who are the most directly impacted, also having lines of impact in terms of decision making authorities? Or do we only ask the people who are the most impacted? What are their thoughts in kind of a town hall setting and then we go back into our private conference rooms and people who don’t live in these areas make all the decisions, or people who live in these areas, but don’t necessarily represent the priorities that the people have go forth and make those decisions. Are people of color with disabilities being disproportionately impacted by such decisions?
I encourage folks to read the work of Alessandra Jerolleman who has a wonderful text out there about disasters through the lens of justice. She has kind of these four principles around what constitutes a just recovery. But you can apply that to nearly every phase of a disaster cycle, and really gain some in depth understanding. So what it means to do this work in a way that is far more equitable, but also far more effective in terms of centering the groups on the ground, who are directly impacted by these crises on a day to day.
Music begins – a synth and sounds of nature that opens into an uplifting Hip Hop groove.
TR: 28:48
Examining disaster through a justice centered lens requires an understanding of disability justice. Unfortunately, I see it used as a broad term that disregards his origin. Disability Justice is specific to the 10 principles articulated by Patty Burns and Sins Invalid. I’ll link to these principles on this episode’s blog post at ReidMyMind.com and encourage you all to read further.
Among the various resources Justice shared with us today, I’d like to make sure you point your browser to JusticeShorter.com. Here you can access some of her past speeches, as well as getting in contact with her. These conversations about disaster preparation can be heavy. So I had to find out how justice unwinds and takes care of herself.
Justice 29:29
I’m happy that you brought up this question because I think people need to have their own resilience rituals. And listen, that word resilience has really thrown a lot of people off because people in power tend to use that as a way of not giving people the type of support and material things that they need to meet their critical needs.
Oh, you’re just so resilient. We’re resilient because we have to be it’s out of necessity. It’s because you have refused to direct funding towards this neighborhood. When I talk about resilience rituals, I mean, the things that keep me getting up and going, and don’t get me wrong, there’s some times that you need to stay down, because rest is essential.
I have learned over the years what I need to pour into me in order to get greatness out of me, and that is not something that can be predefined by anybody else except me. I had to learn that because sometimes people will look to their supervisors or look to mentors, what do I need to do? What do I need to do?
TR: 30:25
Sounds like what we’ve been talking about, an extension of the conversation around safety, who really knows more about what’s best for you than you. For Justice it’s about gospel music, walks on her treadmill, family and
Justice30:39
Just hang out with my girlfriend and have a good dinner. We travel, we do all types of dates that are fun and spunky. And you already know, I love reading, there’s always a book that’s queued up for me that I’m excited to get into. Every time I travel to do a speech or to do things that are related to my job, I try to bake in some time for living life and going and exploring that city and seeing what communities of color are doing there. What are they eating? What are they listening to? How are they having a good time? I try to at least embed myself in the city or in the culture just a little bit while I’m gone.
TR: 31:13
This was a true honor to have justice on the podcast. And you all should know there’s only one way to make that clear.
TR in Conversation with Justice:
It’s a very simple way and it’s by letting you know that you, Justice Shorter are an official member of the Reid My Mind Radio family. So I appreciate you.
Justice 31:27
I appreciate you. Thank you so much. It was a joy.
TR: 31:30
There’s so much in this episode. I honestly think this is one to hold on to, refer back to. It’s a resource for real. A resource that will be right here for you. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Remember transcripts and more are at ReidMyMind.com.
And now, in case of an emergency, I need to make sure you know that’s R to the E, I, D!
— Sample: “D! And that’s me in the place to be!” Slick Rick
TR:
Like my last name.
— Reid My Mind Radio Outro
TR:
Peace
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