Audio File
Transcript
My name is DaJuan Davis. I am 11 years.
My name is Robert Johnson. I am 16 years old.
We interviewed Justin Laing on August 8th, 2018.
I was born in Boston, MA, and then I grew up in Silver Spring, MD, on Ross Court, and I grew up in a little cul-de-sac there, about a mile outside of Washington, DC. It’s a neighborhood that, in all my time growing up, I never saw anything more than, like, a little fist fight that we were in, never knew anybody that was shot. That was never a risk that we were outside that could happen.
Well, I applied to colleges, you know, and I applied to five schools. I got into three: Rutgers, Pitt, I think Drew in New Jersey. Didn’t have very good grades, but I knew I had good SAT scores, and I knew that being a black boy with good SAT scores at that time in life, I would still get into a school I wanted to go to cause I wanted to go to a school with black people. I came to Pitt, and I had a new environment and a new set of rules. I graduated in 4 1/2 years. I didn’t really care that much. I had expected to graduate. Plus, by the time I was graduating, I had a child on the way, so I had other concerns on my mind. I was a probation officer. I only did it because I needed to get health insurance for my son who was going to be born, and his mother was in college, so I needed to find health insurance, and my fraternity brother knew someone at the county, and so he said you could apply for this job as probation officer. So I studied every single day to take this civil service exam, and then I scored really high and then I got the job, but that’s how I became a probation officer. It wasn’t because I had any interest. I never thought of it. Was it, like, dangerous? No, not really. I wasn’t from an environment where anybody… that people were on probation, I didn’t have much experience in my family with it. I wasn’t really prepared for the very anti police mentality. I had friends in the Hill District that I knew because I used to work at the Hill House. My first job really out of school was in probation. But I was working at the Hill House as a tutor, and so I had made some friends of kids, their parents. And so when I would come up and around, people started to say, like, you have to be careful because some people up here are on probation. They might recognize you. It was only dangerous when I was out of the protection of the probation office and then in spaces where highly criminalized police communities like the Hill District. Then you don’t have that protection anymore, and so that’s where it could be a little dicey, but I never really ran into too much.
Certain neighborhoods are decided by this city to have lots of criminals, and there are lots of police cars, like in this neighborhood here. I-I lived over here for 20 years, and it’s forever a police car driving around, moving around. If you drive around all the time, you’re going to find more problems. So it’s criminalized. It’s not criminal people, but the society is turning a place into a place of criminality. They’ve decided that.
I work as a consultant. People ask me to help them, like, think through certain problems that they have, certain challenges. So I work with some foundations and arts organizations, and they’re trying to figure out how predominantly white foundations and predominantly people of color theaters can work together and get more money and resources to those theaters, and they have to figure that out. I used to work for a foundation. And so, they call me and they say “maybe you could help us think this problem through.” Or up here on Bedford Ave. they were trying to figure out what kind of new housing to build and Trek was doing that work. And so they said, “Maybe you might talk to people up here and help us do focus groups and figure out what people might want to see.” All this kind of stuff that probably sounds probably very boring to you, I’m quite sure. I-I tell you, I love it, though, because you know what? I’m at work right now in my T-shirt and my jeans. I just did a phone call. I’ll do another phone call in an hour. I work for the company I started and then that company I advertise the company to different people and they hire me. I work for them, but I can work in my house, I can work in my office, I can work in my car. Consultant might sound boring, but having your own company, I find it interesting and I get to wear a Black Panther shirt to work.
Read black Authors, watch black movies. Listen to a wide variety of, like, black music. I would say just to be curious about your culture and then want to contribute to it, but you can contribute better if you’re learning more about it. So I think those would be some things I would say, like, watch old movies, like from the 70s, like, try to look for what is it people want me to know that’s right in front of me. What’s right in front of me, and how do I get off the beaten path? The road everybody else walks, how do I get off of that and find my own curiosities and follow my own interests.