Good Council
Justin Farmer is a Councilman for the Town of Hamden, but he’s not your typical politician — he’s also a current student at Southern Connecticut State University. Elliot Wailoo, SY ’21, spoke to him about diversity, activism, being young in his field, and more.
Elliot Wailoo: So you were elected last fall.
Justin Farmer: I ran in a primary last fall. I then ran in the general election in November, and I got sworn in November 26th.
EW: Can you describe what it’s been like during the first few months on the job?
JF: It can be very taxing. There are days when I’m like, “This is super rewarding.” So far this week, we’ve passed an ordinance to ban fracking waste in the town of Hamden, which is amazing and dope. That was Monday. Tuesday, I went to class, did homework. Today, I went to a rally [about how] our court system has been colluding with ICE and helping to detain people from going to hearings to defend themselves or appearing in court. I then met a young girl. Her aunt and uncle are being deported. She was like, “Hey, can you come up to Hartford tomorrow?” I was like, “Yes, I am a councilman, but I’m also a student and I use public transportation, and to get to Hartford at 8 a.m. is going to be really hard. I do really care and I do really want to be there but also, that’s really hard. And then I have classes at 1.” So I probably can’t, but I’ll try. I ran into an old friend. He was like, “Hey do you want to be on the radio tomorrow?” So I’m going to be on a radio show tomorrow. So there are days when I’m like, “Whoa, this is amazing,” and days when I’m overwhelmed.
EW: What is the racial makeup of the Hamden city council?
JF: We have a more diverse council this year than any other year in the history of Hamden. We have a woman who’s openly a lesbian. We have three people of color, two being of Caribbean descent — myself, and the other one is Jamaican. Then we have an African American woman. That’s the diversity.
EW: How big is the council?
JF: 15 people.
EW: So the other 12 are all white?
JF: Yup.
EW: Interesting.
EW: So it’s a mismatch.
JF: It’s a mismatch. And we’re the most diverse council ever. And population-wise, probably 40 percent of the town, between black, Hispanic, and Asian, are POC. And I’m the only black male, only person-of-color male on the council.
EW: And are you the youngest by a long shot?
JF: So the second youngest, my good friend Brad — he convinced me to run — he’s a year older than me. I am the youngest on the council by a year, but I’m also the majority whip as well, so I’m the youngest person in leadership meetings. [The next] is 17 years older than me.
EW: Wow. So being majority whip — what does that entail? What is that like so far?
JF: I go to the leadership meetings, and we decide the week before what goes on the agenda that we bring to council. Anyone can technically bring anything to the floor, but in some ways, [the agenda is] a way to control the narrative, and in other ways, it allows us to figure out what questions need to be asked, and what department heads need to be present in order for us to get to the heart of certain issues before we bring them up [so that we can] plan ahead. But being the youngest person, there’s always things like, “Hey, I need a ride to the city meeting,” or, “Hey, I took the city bus, so it took an hour and a half to get here,” or “Oh, I completely disagree with that.” And then a number of people are like, “You don’t understand how this happened, ’cause back in ’83”… Like, I wasn’t even alive [then].
EW: So it sounds like you’re not taken as seriously as you’d like to be taken sometimes?
JF: Some of the times. it happens that way. And sometimes, I take on responsibilities. Like, over Christmas break, I got a call from this couple. They were about to lose their apartment. They wanted help, and I was like, “I’m being taken really seriously; my authority’s being taken really seriously.” It’ll be like, “Last week you told me I’m so mature for my age, and this week, you’re like, ‘You don’t understand; you’ll understand when you’re older.’”
EW: So do you feel like that is mostly happening along the lines of age? You’ve spoken earlier about race, class, national origin, ability. Do you feel like it cuts a certain way specifically along age, or is it just all of them together is what’s influencing that?
JF: I would say it would depend on the situation, but surprisingly enough, in terms of working with my colleagues, my disability comes up the least in conversations. There’s the question of what my leadership looks like with me having Tourette’s and me being young and having other stuff, like, “Can you deal with all the stress of that and this?” To which I always laugh. The expectations for a young black man who has a disability… [Not much is expected], so this is a huge confidence booster.
EW: I remember you said your friend Brad was one of the first to encourage you to run, so I’ll ask you to describe first your previous organizing experience or political experience, and then get into the process of being like, “Oh, maybe I should actually run” and what that was like.
JF: So my senior year, I got sick. I found out I had Tourette’s. I started having seizures. My senior year, I was there for three weeks of high school, and the rest of the year I was on homebound, and then I went to alternative schools and oftentimes fought with the school districts to get services for me. Up until that point, I wanted to be a marine biologist because I could care [for the animals], but I also cared on a personal level about people. I was like, “Whoa. This experience happened to me. I don’t want any other person to go through this experience. We need to be looking out for each other more.” I got sick for about a year. Two or three months, I’d have seizures every two weeks. Then I went abroad, saw different places, and I was like, “Whoa, there’s different opportunities for me.”
EW: Where’d you go?
JF: I went to Russia. which was interesting being black. It was like, “Oh, I’m like a celebrity; I’m, like, the coolest person ever, and me having Tourette’s and weird movements is sometimes seen as the coolest thing ever.” It was the opposite [of America]. It was really weird. So I did organizing for two years. Anything I saw, I got involved with. Black Lives Matter stuff, I did that for a bit, and then I did stuff with ULA [Unidad Latino en Accion], and then I did stuff with LGBT rights. Anything that I agreed with, I was like, “I’m gonna do that.” And I did that for two years. And people knew me and they saw me, and some of the older people were like, “You don’t understand.” […] So I said, “All right, I’ll get involved with a political campaign and show you I know what I’m talking about.” And my friend Brad — he was a year older than me — he had graduated and was running for senatorial…
EW: How did you meet him?
JF: I meet him in high school, but we didn’t really know each other. We were both in the Reptile Club, actually. I kind of vaguely knew him. We obviously have become different people since then. And he was running this campaign. He was like, “I’m going to run next year because I want to change things […] You should run. You seem like you care a lot about these issues. You talk a lot about it. Why aren’t you running?” “I’m disabled.” “That doesn’t matter. FDR. JFK had back pain.” And I’m like, “I’m poor.” “So are tons of people. You can better represent them.” He just wouldn’t allow me to make an excuse. and then I decided to run. Things that I learned on other people’s campaigns, I just kind of copied to see if they’d work for me.
EW: Other people — do you mean just Brad or were there other candidates too?
JF: Well, I had also worked for a ton of different campaigns for Working Families. I’d just figure out the culture and the nuances and the issues and talk to the people and meet them where they were. And I’ve seen some of the work that’s been done in door-knocking campaigns, [like] community cleanups. I want to add that to my campaign.
EW: So first you won the primary, and then you won the general election. How close were they, and how confident were you going in?
JF: So the primary. I started knocking a month before the convention. I knew I probably wasn’t going to get the democratic endorsement, which makes it harder, but I also knew that after the last election, a lot of people have been frustrated with politics and politicians. And my whole thing was just like, “Hey, I get it.” My district is really complicated. I have Edgerton Park. Medium income in that area is $200,000. I have my immediate neighborhood where most people don’t make more than $34,000. We had nine shootings in the last eight months. Two deaths, three blocks from my house. And then we have the suburbs. So you have completely different communities represented by one person. I’ve told people, “These are the things that are important to me, and I care. You might not agree with me on all the issues; you might feel I’m too young and not experienced enough, but one thing you won’t think is that I’m lazy or I don’t care.”
And that’s pretty much like how I just ran the campaign. In terms of how close I am, 23 and I won by 23 votes in the primary. (Laughs) And then in the general I have no competition, but I had one of the highest voter turnouts out of any of the district.
EW: Do you feel that pressure now, or do you feel that it’s something you can roll with?
JF: I feel that pressure. I think part of it is knowing, because I have so many different groups of people who have different interests and different concerns, [that] people came up to vote for me. Reaching back out to those people… I’m going to be door knocking again in general, just to say, “Hey, these are issues… I see now what things are important to you.” But it’s harder for me to make some of these decisions now about the long term implications, and in some ways, I don’t really feel like can know my constituents […] How do I make decisions for 5,000 people if I’ve only met 500 of them, and do I really know those 500 people? So I feel that’s one of the biggest things for me. I feel I’m making the right decisions and I feel that the decisions I’m making the are the best decisions. I want people to get more involved and I know it’s so hard to get involved and the time it takes to be involved.
EW: Speaking of being involved, I think I saw you a few weeks ago the Fossil Free Yale thing. So I think a lot of times, like we work talking about earlier, the relationship between Yale students and the community could use work, right? What are some of the ways you envision Yale being more active in that?
JF: I’m going to be door-knocking again. I think one of the things that frustrates me is that a lot of people care. So one of the things I love to say — I’m trying to coin this the phrase — I feel that we have a lot of smart politicians and compassionate activists of voters and we need to flip that. It needs to be that we have compassionate politicians and we have smart activists and constituents. The way it should be is, people see a problem. They educate themselves on the problem and then they say, “We have this compelling argument, we’re on this problem, and we want you to care about it, and these are the things why we need to care about this is what you need to do.” That’s where we need to get, and I think oftentimes we think of these benevolent leaders who have all these resources, who could just magically do things. In my case, because I know I’m young, I know I don’t know much. So I’m doing street cleanups. It’s the simplest thing, but it brings people from different backgrounds together. And I don’t just do it in the most hard hit areas; I do it in all different areas that have debris. Like, “Hey, on this day I’m going to go and clean up this area and I want us to just talk. Just pick up garbage together.” I want people to get used to the idea of door-knocking, where it’s just like, “Why are you knocking on my door? You’re here for reelection?” “Nope. I’m just here to knock on your door to let you know that I care and I wanted to know what you care about, because I’m not the only person who affects your life. You have state reps, state senators, other top-of-the-ticket candidates like the gubernatorial race who affect your life. And if you can’t spend five minutes on me to hear about what issues I’m talking about and for me to hear what’s important to you or if you feel that those people are swindlers and they don’t care about you…” There’s so many people who are like, “I’ve never had someone knock on my door before, and I’ve lived here for 20 years.” [Also], I’m gonna really be pushing for community gardens. They’re a lot of work. you know. You have to be in communion and spend the time to make shifts for people to take care of the plants. You have to pull together resources. You have to try and educate yourself about these different things. It doesn’t matter if you’re a professor or you’re the guy who wants a bodega. Neither of you have expertise in this thing and you have to be in communion, have to learn from each other. Those are the ideas I have about how to bring people together.
EW: I can see Yale students getting involved in that, too.
JF: I feel like there’s a good amount of people who work for Yale, a good amount of people who are affiliated with Yale, who are constituents of mine. I think [unhealthy dynamics between Yale and New Haven] can be broken down where people can understand that our communities affect each other. Those barriers or lines that we put up are artificial; people cross them all the time and we have to try to understand different cultures and realize that they intersect all the time.
EW: We were talking earlier also about like whether or not you have long-term political aspirations. While you’re studying political science in school, what are you thinking for the future?
JF: I’m probably switching to IDS. Interdisciplinary studies. I want to be a marine biologist. I care about overfishing, the seas, what that means. I also realize that I care a lot about a lot of stuff. I always joke that I want a living wage to play with fish. That’s my aspirational goal. Like, “What do you want to do later on?” “I want a living wage; I want to play with fish.” To me, that means I’ll be at a point in my life where educationally, I have attained enough education to kind of do what I want. If politics is a possibility, that might be a thing, but two years from now I might go, “Okay, I did my politics, I did my public service, I fixed as many problems as I could, now I’m off to grad school.” Or I might go, “I know how to do it better this time, let me try again. I don’t know. I want a living wage to play with fish.” (Laughs)
