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JUSTICE: Welcome to your audio companion formed in support of access and in the spirit of community. I’m Justice Shorter. And you’re listening to the Disaster Justice Guidebook for People of Color with Disabilities.
Each companion is comprised of remarkable reflections and recommendations gathered from interviews with incredible People of Color. This creative collaboration is brought to you by Seeded Ground, the Adult Advocacy Centers in 1217 compound. May this offering be a salve and a sought-out source of solidarity for all those most impacted by disasters and crisis.
This particular companion is guided by insights from Britney Wilson. Britney is a civil rights attorney, professor and all around bad-ass Black disabled woman. Although Britney will be sharing some of her thoughts and experiences related to the legal system, nothing she mentions in this companion should be considered as direct legal advice. Please seek out an attorney or legal service for assistance with addressing specific legal problems or concerns.
Here’s Britney.
BRITNEY: It’s interesting because I do a very particular type of law. Like my background is in federal civil rights litigation. And mostly I do class actions, so I represent large groups of people and they literally call it complex litigation, that’s what it’s called.
And I challenge systemic discriminatory practices on behalf of large groups of people. And then I do some, you know, non court-based, directly court-based, just advocacy with community. Usually advocating for policy changes. Again, sort of challenging broad-scale discriminatory practices.
And so, I think the challenge with that, I’m always thinking, usually thinking in terms of policies, policies, policies. What are the practices that government entities follow, cause I usually sue government and private actors, who do bad things, companies, things like that. What are the policies they have in place, even if they’re not their official policies. How do they behave in their regular practice that we can say that it’s a policy, and how do we change that, how do we challenge it? That’s usually what I’m thinking of, which can sometimes be, I don’t want to say in conflict, but I think like, one of my former supervising attorneys said, when you’re everybody’s lawyer, you’re nobody’s lawyer. Which I think about a lot, because, in challenging these policies, sometimes you don’t always cater to the individual day-to-day needs, questions or demands of specific people. Does that make sense?
JUSTICE: Um-hmm.
BRITNEY: So that’s sort of my caveat in terms of how I think about these issues, but like I enjoy the big picture thinking.
So, I’m happy to dream and imagine with you, but like sometimes I regret this, but I wonder if I’m as helpful to individual people because that’s not specifically the type of law that I practice.
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JUSTICE: Britney went on to discuss hope. More specifically, how the preservation of hope can be found in the pages of inclusive disaster plans.
BRITANY: Man, it is hope to live in a nutshell. I mean I think about this often. Like I have sort of, as a Black disabled woman, resigned myself to the fact that if there was ever any major emergency, I’m not going to make it. And so, when I think about, like, what justice means for disabled People of Color, I want them to at least, I want us to at least not have that resignation to like have the hope that there will be a plan for our lives to save our lives.
But if there’s a plan that the plan will actually be executed in a way that we can take advantage of and that people will care enough about our lives to do what they can to save them. But I have long sense sort of just resigned myself, like I’ve told people on numerous occasions, like my mom, I’m like, you know, like, I fought schools. I fought administrations. I’ve been like, you know, if there’s ever any real thing I’m just, you know, see you at the crossroads, like sorry, like, cause I just know, like I’ve fought with people and it’s hard enough to like negotiate your humanity. That’s one, that’s the first level of it.
And then to actually put a plan in place that can be implemented as a whole, whole other thing. And I’m from New York City, so I lived through 9/11. And then there’s like the more basic emergencies. Like I’ve been in university housing in the middle of the night when the fire alarms start going off, you know. So, there’s like the catastrophic disaster, like terrorism, that sort of thing. And then there’s like the more quintessential run of the mill, even though it’s still a disaster, a fire, stuff like that.
I think justice for me is just for disabled People of Color to know that we have a hope to survive.
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JUSTICE: As people with disabilities, we know all too well that our survivability is inseverable from our advocacy. Britney suggests that we be persistent in or advocacy, while simultaneously verifying every single access promise.
BRITANY: I think just like pre-lawyer and being a human and then later being a student and things like that, I think just persistence. I spent many an hour in university offices talking to administrators complaining that like the fire alarm went off and they would tell me, oh, like, but we do have a plan, because, of course, they can’t really tell you they don’t have a plan. I’m like okay, what is the plan. There’s a list. There’s a list of all the names of students and people who would need help in an emergency. And I’m like okay. And then what do they do with the list, right? Like how do I know — how do they know how to match names with people. And then, how do they know where to find those people?
So, like, not only persistence, but also specifics and getting specifics. And I didn’t realize how useful that also was going to ultimately be to me being an attorney as well. Because it’s one thing to like get a ruling or get a judgment, and then another thing to have that judgment implemented. And so, I realize I’ve been doing that my whole life, like okay, you said there’s a list, how do I make sure my name is on the list, one? And then how do I make sure that they match the names on the list to the actual people? Are their phone numbers next to the names on the list, cause, you know, I’m not always in the same spot on this campus, you know? How do I make sure they know how to find me?
Oh, that’s a good idea, phone numbers, phone numbers, okay yes. And then it’s like okay, show me the list, ‘cause I got to verify what you told me. I can’t just trust since you just told me my name is on the list. I need you to show me the list periodically. Does it get updated? Does it change? Are there designated people who are supposed to assist with finding me? Is there someone who cultivates the list? Who keeps the list just in case of emergencies. Is the list itself in a fireproof place? You know what I mean, like all of these sort of questions that you realize. And I think sometimes you don’t always know what to ask or what to insist upon, but I think surviving disasters or going through chaotic situations, sort of adds to your knowledge as to what should be on that list or what questions you should be asking.
So, it’s persistence. It’s specificity. And also like I think that me, and I’m sure that other disabled People of Color have gotten good at building or finding, I hate the word “allies,” but I’m going to use it for lack of better word, not even allies, but just like people who know you and people who care enough about you to inquire on your behalf.
I think like making friends, for disabled people, is a survival skill. You have to know the name of the man on the corner because he might be the only one that looks out for you if something pops off. Like that has been the story of my life. Like thank God I’m a person who wants to know the man on the corner’s name anyway. But I think shared marginalized identity or shared patterns of being overlooked, makes us look out for one another. And I hope that makes sense, but also like knowing people so that when that plan that you worked so hard to put in place is not executed properly or falls apart or something happens, the person you wouldn’t expect or even the person you would expect, I don’t know, is gonna say, well, where’s Britney? Have we thought about this?
And maybe if you’ve done your work well enough, if you’ve made enough of an impression on them, maybe it won’t be just where’s Britney. Maybe your interaction with them will have taught them to think more broad than that, and they’ll say, what about the disabled people? It’s like networking for survival.
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JUSTICE: Yes, Britney is a very skilled and experienced advocate, but she reminds us that every person has the right to make their disaster concerns known.
BRITANY: I tell you this, nobody cares about my job or my resume, because when they look at me, that’s not what they see. So, you definitely don’t have to have a certain degree or certain job. And I was doing a lot of this before I had either of those things.
I think it really is just asking the questions and not going away. And you have to know that your life matters because people are not necessarily going to know that. And I think what I’ve also learned, I don’t like this, but I’ve also kind of learned it as a survival tactic, and I think this is especially the case for People of Color, I don’t know about you, but like because of racism, while you’re being persistent and while you’re asking questions, that doesn’t always come across the same way for us as it does for other people, cause you know, immediately, I’m the angry Black woman. I’m the Black disabled woman with a attitude, you know.
So, we have to, while we’re navigating all these complex situations, we also have to think about, for our survival, how we’re coming across. And this is something that I’m mindful of as well.
And some of it is like I have to play certain rolls at certain times in order to get certain things. And again, I don’t like it at all. I’m not like the respectability politics type of person. But I also understand that like in an emergency or in a particular situation, if you need somebody to react the way you need them to react, and the way you’re coming across to them is a hinderance to that, you might have to adjust.
And so sometimes what I do, is I will play the role I think people have of me in their heads, to an extent. And so, for me, a lot of times that is the young girl. I’m a grown woman. I’m 30 plus years old. But, many people look at me, and they still see, oh, young girl, right. And I’ll have to play that. And so, I’ll do that. Like I was on the train, on Amtrak maybe two weeks ago. And I was trying to get somebody, the conductor to get a bridge plate so I could get off of the train.
And I was waiting, waiting, waiting. I’m like asking for the bridge plate, asking for the bridge plate. Finally, I was like, to a person who is getting off the train before me, walking past, excuse me. Excuse me. If you see the conductor up there, can you ask him to bring the bridge plate? Like I know that I’m embodying a role. So, now the person’s like, oh, here’s this young girl left on the train. It’s up to me to make sure the conductor knows to bring the bridge plate so she can get off, right.
That worked. It worked more than two or three times the conductor had been passing while the train was in motion, for me to remind him I needed a bridge plate. This person going up to him and being, like, hey, because now, she was on the case. That was me building an ally by playing a role. Now she’s on the case, make sure you get the bridge plate. And the bridge plate came.
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JUSTICE: Let me say it again, access must be verified. It must also include multiple avenues for people with disabilities. But we can often feel disconnected from plausible options due to those twin threats of racism and ableism.
BRITANY: I don’t know if it’s wisdom.
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I feel like most of it has been, oh, this ain’t going to save you. None of these channels are going to safe you. By that I mean the judicial channels, advocacy channels, all that. Sometimes, too, I naively thought growing up, I became a lawyer because, you know, I had a chip on my shoulder. And I thought like, well, I’m going to get these skills, and then I’m going to fix it and nobody’s going to treat me like this because I’m going to have this, you know, credential. And I’m going to know my rights. And it’s all going to be fixed. No. Nope. Nope. That’s not going to save you either.
So, I think that’s a hard thing to acknowledge as well sometimes. But I’ve had to sort of discover that again and again. But I think, overall, I do the same thing with agencies and entities that I do with individuals, like be persistent. Be specific. Ask the questions that need to be asked. Like, ‘cause plenty of people will tell you, oh, this is our protocol. Our policy is, you know, when you book your trip, you select that you need assistance. And then this happens or that’s supposed to happen, but because you know that just because it’s on paper, just because it’s the policy, or supposed to be the practice, doesn’t mean it is what actually happens. That’s why, you know, when you get out, I’m just using the train example again.
Even though it’s on my ticket, even though I requested assistance in advance, when I see you, Mr. Conductor, I’m going to make sure you see me when I get on, right. Just like when you make sure when you see my ticket, I’m gonna be like, you know, I’m getting off in DC. And he’s like okay, okay, I got you. Okay, and then when you come back, I’m going to remind you again. Just so you know, I’m getting off in DC, right. And then I’m going to make a friend in the aisle next to me. So, it’s again, I would do the same thing with the courts or with whatever agency I’m dealing with, right. Like your paperwork says that this is the policy. But on this day, X happened. Why? Why did that happen? Or what do I need to do so that this doesn’t happen?
Or even explaining to people, even though your policy is this, here’s the real world impact that that actually has on people, because some people think just because they have it in writing and that’s the policy, that that’s perfect. And they can’t do anything to change it. And you have to be the one to explain to them, here’s why that actually makes no sense. So, you have to bring those same individual interpersonal skills that you bring in your everyday life, the persistence, specificity, creativity to those agencies. And I think also like people tend to think when they’re before specific bodies, be it the court, agency, whatever, that they have to be a certain way or present themselves in a certain way. And I think like, I’m the same person everywhere. And I think, obviously, you have to, different situations call for different mechanisms, but I think the same, same traits that made you successful on interpersonal level, can make you successful in those other forums. I don’t know if I’m answering your question but…
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JUSTICE: Now turn with me, if you will, towards love. Britney offers this love message to other People of Color with Disabilities.
BRITANY: Oh, wow. I mean I think it relates back to my, when you asked me like what does justice mean to me, it’s the same thing. It’s you matter. I want us to have the hope and expectation that we will survive these situations, because our lives, our lives matter, not to be cliche or anything like that, but because we deserve to be in the world. People want us to be in the world. We are worthy. And even if people don’t, like so much of what I learn is that we can’t base our feelings on other people’s feelings. Like I think that’s the toughest part for us. Like we got to be deeply rooted, because the love that we want, we are not guaranteed to get back from society in any way, shape or form.
So, we have to be deeply rooted in ourselves, ourselves and our self-love, and our self-worth, because we might not get it externally. But that’s something that I’m still working on every day. It’s a process, but I think if you hold on to that, we will survive. We will believe we deserve to survive because we will find a way to make it happen.
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JUSTICE: Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha urges us to believe in a deeply disabled future, not just as a cautionary tale or scary story, but as a dream, when I dream of a disabled future, I think about teachers of color with disabilities having access to all emergency exits within their schools. I envision them being able to evacuate their students using clear and convenient paths of travel. I think of them arriving to an accessible school bus that has low floors and a ramp that allows everyone to enter through the same door.
I smile at the idea of them temporarily locating to a safe zone or safe space that has a blue room for students with sensory disabilities. I mean, I could go on and on and on. But more importantly, what are your dreams of a disabled future in connection to disaster justice? Here’s how Britney answered this very same question.
BRITNEY: Another huge question. I feel like I don’t want to over simplify it and say it looks like universal design, or universal access. Like I think a lot of what you were describing in terms of like, being able to put your kids on the bus, that’s like the base level of what I think it looks like. What I would want it to look like, just not, not having to like work for these basic things like being able to get in and out of doors or buildings. There being an emergency plan for people with disabilities, that basic level of universal access. I think just like more broad than that, I want us to be able to stop having to negotiate our worth and our value, cause it’s exhausting. I want us to be spared that, I don’t know how, but that’s what I think I want most of all.
I think I want a world where like love looks accessible and available to us, you know, in all of its forms. But we don’t have to negotiate that. I want like so many of us to not have to live in abject poverty, you know what I mean, as like a function of disability. And I feel like that has to be something with like these systems of capitalism, so that they don’t like hinge our disabilities on, you know, notions of like, actual dollar value and worth. And people have what they need and still be able to like enjoy life and go on vacations and you know, actually experience and live in the world and have a surplus, you know, in the sense of like, not just having your basic needs met, but also like I said, be able to enjoy life and go on vacations and live in the world in a way that doesn’t deprive other people.
So, I don’t know, something post capitalistic. I have no idea. But I want us to have more than enough. I want us to have love. I want us to not have to negotiate our identities and out value. And I want us to have basic access.
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JUSTICE: Legal and legislative advocacy are avenues many pursue in an attempt to procure justice before, during and after disasters. Here Britney explains a bit about the incredible legal work she and her students conducted in response to prejudicial treatment people with disabilities received concerning crisis standards of care.
BRITANY: So, I and my clinic students lost our challenge to New York State’s crisis standards of care. We lost it on appeal, United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit. And we filed a lawsuit on behalf of people with disabilities who use ventilators, chronic ventilator users, challenging New York State’s Crisis Standard of Care that say if you go to a hospital during a time of triage, where there are not enough ventilators, for example, like during COVID when ventilators were in short supply, your personal ventilator could be taken from you and reallocated to a person deemed to have a, quote unquote, higher likelihood of survival based on a mechanical score that measures the function of your underlying organs, called a sequential organ failure assessment score.
So, we challenge that portion of New York Crisis Standards of Care and we knew it was a long shot when we filed the lawsuit because in Federal Court, when you bring a claim in Federal Court, which we brought our claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act, you have to have something called “standing” to bring a lawsuit. And standing tells you a lot about individualist America. Standing says that you can’t just challenge something because you think it’s wrong. You have to be personally impacted by the thing that you’re challenging.
There are very specific rules for what it means to be personally impacted by something. And so, we knew that because we weren’t, any of our plaintiffs actually had their personal ventilator taken from them and reallocated, that we were going to have a difficult time bringing this lawsuit. We were saying that the policy itself was discriminatory. And that it was stopping people and making people afraid from seeking healthcare because they knew that these guidelines existed.
And the court ultimately said that’s not enough for you to have standing and they dismissed our lawsuit. So, like that’s the epitome of disaster sort of situations and we actually based our legal theory on another disability-related disaster lawsuit, that some previous attorneys had brought that was, had to do with like hurricane preparedness. And they said, essentially, in that case, they said that if you have an emergency preparedness plan, you have to have a plan that is accessible to people with disabilities. So, let’s say the city has a plan for a hurricane.
And we evacuate everybody and put everybody on buses or we put everybody in shelters, you have to have accessible buses, and you have to have accessible shelters. If you don’t, if you have an emergency preparedness plan that is not accessible to people with disabilities, then that lack of an accessible emergency preparedness plan is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That’s what the case that we relied on said. We made the same argument. We said, well, these crisis standards of care are New York State’s emergency preparedness plan. They just happen to be a different type of emergency. It’s a public health emergency as opposed to a hurricane emergency or a national disaster emergency.
And we said if the lack of an accessible emergency preparedness plan is an injury under the Americans with Disabilities Act, then we should have standing to bring our lawsuit. And the court said no. No, actually, you don’t. We didn’t take anybody’s vent. And even more I think alarming than that, to my students in particular, you know, they, ultimately attended the oral argument in court. They heard the judges and things like that. And there were a lot of really difficult things that the judges themselves said on the record about like, well, don’t we value some lives more than others? Like are, isn’t that what we do, don’t we make judgment calls, like just the level of comfort and dismissal of the fears and concerns of our clients about the worthiness of their lives that made my students uncomfortable, right.
So, like that’s an example of disaster emergency preparedness in a different context that I’ve done as a lawyer as it relates to people with disabilities. But it just shows you sort of how the agencies and the entities that we look to for guidance and support, like our suit was thrown out of court on a very specific legal technicality standing. But that completely ignores people’s lived experiences and the fact that people were afraid of these guidelines. That it, you know, potentially impacted them from seeking healthcare because they knew that they existed and the fact that the guidelines themselves were discriminatory. It wasn’t enough for a court of law to say, um maybe we should change this.
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JUSTICE: As People of Color with Disabilities, we tend to bear so many personal and collective losses. So, I, of course, had to ask Britney, how she keeps going.
BRITANY: I don’t think I would define it as hope. But like another thing that I read with my students, so Derrick Bell, father of critical race theory, former civil rights attorney and law professor, he has this essay called “Racial Realism.” And, basically, he argues that racism is not going away. That it basically changes form.
And what we’re doing is fighting against the latest iteration of the form. And a lot of people, lot of people hated this essay. And like, oh my gosh, look at all the progress we’ve made, how can you say this? What do you mean? But I loved this essay because he was like, the goal is not to think that you’re going to fix it, not to think that it’s going to go away, that you’re going to save people, all that, right. It’s the fight is worthwhile because, if you didn’t fight, everybody would be swallowed up. We wouldn’t be here if you didn’t fight.
If somebody before you didn’t fight, your job is to fight so that somebody else can fight, right. It’s to continue on. And like I said, a lot of people don’t like it, makes them feel bad. But when I really interrogated, like, well why are you doing this work, because you don’t want to do it from a place, like savior complex. You don’t want to be like, ah, I have saved the world. I have fixed everything, like. And that’s a lot of pressure anyway.
So, it actually helped me. I was like, oh, so I’m not going to fix it? Okay, cool. Bet. Like my job is to fight against the latest iteration. Somebody fought so that I could be here, and I’m going to fight so somebody else can fight. And that’s the way I look at it. And that’s not to say that like, it’s not exhausting, it is. But I’m doing my part right now, and that is worthwhile.
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JUSTICE: We fight so that someone else can fight. That will stick with me for a while. We must all do our part and I hope this entire interview served you in whatever ways you needed it to. Thank you so much for listening. For more information and to access other audio companions or the full written Disaster Justice Guidebook, go to JusticeShorter.com or AdultAdvocacyCenters.org.
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Transcribed by Michelle Houston
Justice Shorter 