{"id":188907,"date":"2017-01-16T17:27:36","date_gmt":"2017-01-17T01:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/?p=188907"},"modified":"2026-02-12T17:22:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T01:22:21","slug":"dvp-interview-jennifer-justice-and-john-burke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2017\/01\/16\/dvp-interview-jennifer-justice-and-john-burke\/","title":{"rendered":"DVP Interview: Jennifer Justice and John Burke"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Burke interviewed Jennifer Justice at StoryCorps for the Disability Visibility Project\u2122 at StoryCorps San Francisco on August 28, 2014. In this clip, Jennifer Justice talks about living with disabilities, her mother having polio as a child, enduring multiple craniofacial surgeries in high school, experiencing job discrimination, finding a disability community and being inspired to become an activist.<\/p>\n<div class=\"embed-soundcloud\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1360\" height=\"400\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?visual=true&#038;url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F303067199&#038;show_artwork=true&#038;maxwidth=1360&#038;maxheight=1000\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<h3><b>Text Transcript:<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Instrumental music \u2013 twangy guitar, bluegrass \/ Southern style]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>John Burke:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\"> What is your earliest memory involving disability?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\"> I remember seeing, you know, that my mom was on TV talking about polio. She was talking about her experience as a kid in 1945. She was talking about her crutch and how she used it to walk and get around. She had to be treated in Atlanta and be away from home for weeks and weeks. My grandparents had to travel by train from Rome, Georgia so it was about an hour to get to visit her. And they could only visit once a week.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">My grandmother was a great advocate for my mom. When my mom came home there was no physical therapist that came to your house. They would just send the parents home with sheets of instructions on how to do exercises to help regain lung strength and muscle strength.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Later on when my mom was in the second grade going into the third grade she had braces on her legs and the third grade classroom was on the second floor up a flight of stairs. And my grandmother convinced the principal to have the third grade classroom move downstairs. I guess that was her idea of a reasonable accommodation before there was such a thing as a reasonable accommodation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Instrumental music \u2013 Solo guitar, slow plucking, mysterious or tense tone]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>John Burke: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">When do you first recall learning about your disabilities?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">It was when I was with the babysitter and um\u2026 I was maybe 3 or 4. I was playing around up by an upstairs window. I looked down and I could see the front sidewalk. I saw my Dad and my brother coming to pick me up. And I said \u2018oh hey, Dad and Mark are here!\u2019. The babysitter was really excited, she like ran down the stairs and she told my dad that I could see.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">And I thought that was kinda weird, you know, [chuckles] that that was a big deal to them. I must have asked about it on the way home and I just remember that feeling like a little uncomfortable. I felt like this was something that was supposed to be the norm, you know. But I didn\u2019t know that my vision was so different than everybody else\u2019s.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Instrumental music fades]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">I felt pretty fine about it as a kid. It was a really small town so nobody really gave me a hard time. It wasn\u2019t difficult until um\u2026 until high school when I started to have to have surgeries.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">So my first surgery was when I was three months old for my cleft lip. They did one side of my lip and then they did the other one when I was five months old. And then I had my cleft palate repaired when I was eighteen months old. The rest of the surgeries started when I was fifteen.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">I was having all of these reconstructive craniofacial surgery. I felt like I didn\u2019t really have a say in any of it and that the adults were making all these pretty grand decisions about my body that I didn\u2019t have any control over. It could be pretty intrusive sometimes. I mean, doctors would make comments like, you know, \u2018we\u2019re gonna give you a pretty face\u2019. I had a female surgeon say they were gonna make me a kissable mouth. [brief laugh in disbelief] And I was just appalled.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Instrumental music \u2013 slow, deliberate, solo guitar plucking, pensive tone]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">You know, I\u2019m legally blind and deaf in my right ear and um\u2026 I have, you know, I have, scars around my mouth and stuff. I feel like my disabilities aren\u2019t particularly self evident to people when they meet me because I don\u2019t use a cane on a regular basis. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s so much an invisible disability as an illegible disability.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>John Burke: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">When did you first learn about the ADA?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Instrumental music fades]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">I had lunch with another activist. I was telling her about some of the problems I had been having with, um, finding a job and the discrimination that I was encountering. And she was telling me about the ADA. I had had people, you know just say really inappropriate things to me during job interviews. I had one woman ask me if I was a little bit handicapped. [laughs]. I actually got the job anyway [laughs] but I was just floored that that was acceptable to say in an interview.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Justice: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">I needed support in terms of not only the legislation but in terms of a community. You know, I became interested in disability activism. I wanted to be able to help people in that self determination process. Just being, just being yourself and loving who you are and thriving as a person with a disability as opposed to trying to hide it or overcome it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Instrumental music \u2013 happy, bright solo guitar] <\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Music Credits: (High Valley Hometown by Lobo Loco, Poissons Grions by cuicuitte featuring renoncule comme, Axletree by Quoin featuring Andrew Freidin, and This Mess is Mine by Picture Postcard. All songs are licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Source: FreeMusicArchive.org<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align:center;\"><b>Support Disability Media and Culture<\/b><\/h2>\n<h2 style=\"text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/donate\/\"><b>DONATE<\/b><\/a><b> to the Disability Visibility Project\u2122!<\/b><\/h2>\n<h3><b>Suggested Reference<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Disability Visibility Project\u2122. (2017, January 16). DVP Interview: Jennifer Justice and John Burke. Retrieved from:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2017\/01\/16\/dvp-interview-jennifer-justice-and-john-burke\/\">https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2017\/01\/16\/dvp-interview-jennifer-justice-and-john-burke\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Image Description:<\/b><\/h3>\n<p>A photo featuring Jennifer Justice and John Burke taken on August 28, 2014. A close-up portrait of a person on the left who appears to be a white and female with long blond hair. She is wearing a white sweater has visual scarring on her face and is smiling with teeth. To her right is a person who appears to be a white man with short dark hair and blue eyes. He is swearing a light blue collared button down shirt and smiling without teeth towards the camera.<\/p>\n<h3><b>Credits:<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Produced for the Disability Visibility Project\u2122 by Yosmay del Mazo and Alice Wong with interviews recorded by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the story of our lives. For more: <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/exit.sc\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.storycorps.org\"><b>www.storycorps.org<\/b><\/a><span style=\"font-weight:400;\"> and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/exit.sc\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.disabilityvisibilityproject.com\"><b>www.disabilityvisibilityproject.com<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">For any questions, please refer to the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/about\/terms-of-useprivacy\/\"><b>Terms of Use<\/b><\/a><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Burke interviewed Jennifer Justice at StoryCorps for the Disability Visibility Project\u2122 at StoryCorps San Francisco on August 28, 2014. In this clip, Jennifer Justice talks about living with disabilities, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2017\/01\/16\/dvp-interview-jennifer-justice-and-john-burke\/\" class=\"read-more\">Continue Reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">DVP Interview: Jennifer Justice and John Burke<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":188915,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[548705951],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dvp-interviews","post-has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/sfb002879_g1.jpg?fit=5184%2C3456&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4H7t1-N8T","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}