PandA Pod: Still No Jingles

All right, everyone, welcome back to the Panda Pod, and oh my gosh, Stephanie. Stephanie, are you there? Are you there out in the podcastverse right now?

I’m here in the podcastverse, yes.

Yes, because we have major news this episode. I mean…

Very major news. Big league news.

Huge. Huge.

Yes.

We have a third host.

Yes! Yes, we do. And it’s because it’s what the people want, okay?

What the people want.

We’ve got to give the people what they want.

Jack, insert the applause noise right here because everyone is so excited.

Producers note, we do not have that sound effect.

Everyone say hi to Raquel, our new third host! Woohoo!

Hi.

So I am one of your hosts, Michelle Bishop, the Voter Access and Engagement Manager at NDRN, and

I’m also one of your hosts, Stephanie Flint, Public Policy Analyst here at NDRN.

And I am Raquel Rosa, the third wheel, and my mom is also not listening to this podcast. I am with the Rep Payee team, and I am also with the Comms team.

I am glad you brought this up because I have a crucial update in the saga of my mom not listening to our podcast. So if you guys remember a couple episodes ago, I said I was going to call her out every single episode until she started listening because she had told us years ago that she listens to the podcast, and we have been referring to her as our only listener for frequently, and I found out she’s never listened. So, I mean, Stephanie had a really good point that if I just say on this podcast that she has to start listening or I’ll keep calling her out when she doesn’t listen to it, she’s never going to hear it. But you guys are not going to believe this. Someone else actually does listen to our podcast. Shout out to our good family friend, Andy. Andy, you are the best. And he definitely told my mom she’d better get her act together, and she has officially started listening to our podcast.

Yay! Two listeners!

Two, we have two whole listeners. We have half as many people listening to this show as is required to make it, so we’re on our way.

Can we get a third? Can we get a third? Can we get a third person to listen to this?

Yes. Everybody call your loved ones. We need them.

Yes. Yes, and members of Congress. Okay, I’m done.

So with us, as always, is of course our faithful producer, Jack Rosen. Hi, Jack.

Hey, everyone. And with that, I think we will go into the news. From the Salem Reporter, schools hiring emergency teachers for special education potentially violating federal law. More than 130 emergency licensed teachers are filling in as special education instructors in Oregon this year, short-changing thousands of students and potentially violating a federal law, that law being the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act or IDEA. Jake Cornett, Executive Director of Disability Rights Oregon said, “High-quality teacher preparation matters for all students, but it’s doubly important for students with disabilities. Teachers who are under prepared are two to three times as likely to leave the classroom. This sort of high teacher turnover among special educators only makes a teacher shortage worse.”

So I didn’t even know emergency certification of teachers was even a thing. Has anyone heard of this before?

Never heard of it. And also too, I’m curious about what criteria they’re even using. Or are they just like, whatever Joe Schmoes come in off the street, are they just saying, “You can be a teacher of…” You know, “You can be an educator of a student with a disability,” or, “You can be educators for students with disabilities in the classroom.” What?

It’s got… It must be related to… I mean, who knows? It’s got to be related to the teacher shortages caused by COVID, right?

Yeah, that’s what I would think. But also too, it’s like Jake said, we need to make sure that these teachers are prepared for their sake, but also, too, the students. That’s really and truly what matters. You know, you see a lot of turnover. It’s already hard enough for our students to get the services that they need. Then you’re going to put a turnover in there of staff that is very likely to happen over the next couple of years, and all of a sudden, so many students are likely going to have to start from square one. And I know that people could also make the argument of, “No, that’s not going to happen,” but considering the current trends, even before the teacher shortage…

I did take a look at this article. It said that low-income students, students with disabilities, and English language learners were the most likely to have underqualified teachers as well.

Not surprised. It’s painful. It’s really sad for our students, and it’s not what they deserve. I mean, free appropriate public education is a thing that all students deserve in these school systems.

And great quote from Jake Cornett. Keep fighting the good fight, Disability Rights Oregon. We see you. What else do we have in the news, Jack?

From the body, reform of HIV criminalization laws gaining traction in Indiana, but not yet there. From a letter Disability Rights Indiana submitted to the state legislature, “Laws criminalizing people living with HIV without basis in current objective scientific evidence risk violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. Title two of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by state and local governments. Indiana’s HIV criminalization laws based on this outdated science may constitute disability discrimination because the laws expressly treat people living with HIV differently from others engaging in the same behavior.” Under the current law in Indiana, if someone spit on another person, for instance, those charges would be enhanced if the person doing the spitting had HIV. It would be enhanced to a felony charge.

I didn’t realize we went back to the 80s.

I never want to go back to the 80s.

Except for when Michelle and I do our sitcom.

That’s true.

I would so watch that.

I don’t know if the people know that Raquel and I have an 80s sitcom that we star in in our own minds.

It’s Michelle and Raquel Take On, and then it’s whatever city we’re visiting.

And you know what we still wouldn’t have done in the 80s? Discriminated against people with HIV.

For the people in the back.

I mean, people who are HIV positive are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. It’s probably one of the major triumphs of getting that bill passed, and that was an historic piece of civil rights legislation. So there’s no justification. The science doesn’t support it. Federal law doesn’t support it. There’s no reason to do this.

Yep. Facts.

And Jack, do we have anything else in the news? Let’s talk about it.

Yes. From ABC6, “Disability rights groups pushing to support Ohio Voters. Disability Rights Ohio has launched the Plan Your Vote Program in an effort to ensure people with disabilities don’t run into any issues casting their ballot this upcoming election season. The organization is providing some key tips, such as a poll worker can help you cast your ballot, you can take as much time as you need, and if you cannot enter your polling place due to your disability, you can vote curbside.” Though I may say more accurately, “If you can’t enter your polling place due to the fact that it is inaccessible to people with disabilities.”

Did you put a voting article in here just for me?

It’s quite possible.

This is why you’re a producer extraordinaire. No, this is actually super important. Planning your vote. I’m so glad this is getting out there. First of all, shout out to Disability Rights Ohio. We love a PNA that gets earned media around their voting work. We’re doing a whole session about that at NDRN’s in-person conference in June, so you might want to check that out. Quick plug, quick plug. Jack, put the link to register in the show notes. Anyway, planning your vote is really, really important and especially for people with disabilities because you think you’re going to vote, you know when election day is coming, and the last thing you want is a surprise on election day when it’s time to get the job done, and things don’t go as planned. So this is something we talk about all the time for voters, and thank you to Disability Rights Ohio for getting the word out, especially in a year like this. It’s a really quiet election year when a lot of voters may not be paying attention, and they need that extra nudge.

So this month is actually Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which NDRN is so excited to celebrate with a good friend of ours, Terry Ao Minnis. Terry is the senior director of the Census and Voting programs for Asian Americans Advancing Justice, AAJC. She was part of the litigation team that challenged adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, co-chairs the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Census Task Force, and was part of the Department of Commerce’s 2010 Census Advisory Committee, as well as the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations.

In terms of voting rights, she was a leader in the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Snaps to that, incredibly important moment in American history. She has been counsel on numerous briefs filed before the Supreme Court on voting rights cases, including Shelby v Holder. No snaps to that, also an incredibly important moment in American history. Minnis was named one of the four living 2020 National Women’s History Alliance honorees, Valiant Women of the Vote. She is one of Now’s 100 Sisters of Suffrage as part of their celebration of the centennial anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. Major snaps to that, incredibly important moment in our history. This is an all-woman hosting team, of course. And she received her Juris Doctorate from American University, Washington College of Law, and her bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago. Terry, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, Michelle. Glad to be here.

Thanks for joining us, Terry. We’re thrilled to have you on for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Can you get us started by telling us more about the month and what it means to you?

To me, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, it’s a time not only to reflect on, but also to celebrate all that our communities have accomplished, overcome, and continue to battle for with respect to our future. In our month, there really is so much to celebrate, including being the fastest-growing population in the country, a growing representation of Asian Americans in Hollywood, and those in our organization and within the community who are making sure our community is represented in the conversations and fights for civil and human rights.

Of course, there’s still so much work to be done to create a fair and equitable society for all, including taking measures to ensure our community members can feel safe in public spaces, giving our community and ally communities ways to intervene safely when confronted with anti-Asian hate, and from ensuring that all Asian Americans are counted in the census, to fighting for our right to vote and equitable access to the ballot box.

Heritage month is the time to center our community, intentionally reflect, and publicly name how far we’ve come as a community, while acknowledging how much further we need to go. For me, it’s also a chance to be in solidarity with so many amazing advocates, such as yourself, both inside and outside the Asian American community, as we all band together to achieve the promise of equity and diversity in our country.

So Terry, I got way too excited about all the voting rights stuff in your bio, and there’s a reason for that. Everybody, all of our listeners know that voting is my jam, but also you and I have actually worked together for a long time, and we talk about this issue a lot. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what intersection you see between being a disabled American and being Asian American. What should our listeners who work in the disability community be paying attention to?

Thanks, Michelle. I’d like to start, as you often remind us, people with disabilities come from all communities. The Census Bureau’s, American Community Survey shows that currently at least 8% of the Asian American community are members that have a disability. Often we know that in our work particularly, we can silo the work and the efforts around our advocacy, but the reality is that these are not separate communities, but rather communities that intermingle and share issues, concerns, and needs, and exactly as you said, are where we’ve had opportunities to really collaborate and work together.

So I think one area where there are particular commonalities are for those Asian Americans that are limited English proficient or LEP, right? And that is somebody who is noted as a person who speaks English less than very well. That’s the actual definition for that. And due to the racist immigration laws historically in this country, the Asian American community is highly immigrant. I believe we’re at about over 90% of our community who are either immigrants themselves or children of immigrants. So as a result, we see that Asian Americans speak dozens of languages and dialects, and three out of four Asian Americans in America today speak a language other than English at home.

We also know, thanks to our Census bureau and the work that they do around collecting data, that 45.2% of Asian American citizens of voting age are limited English proficient and experience some difficulty communicating in English. So this is important in this context that we’re talking about because language barriers are a major obstacle for Asian Americans when it comes to voting. Voting is a complex process for even fluent English speakers, so you can imagine for voters for whom English is a second language, that they will face even more confusion when trying to vote and navigate our complex voting system, especially if they immigrated from a country with a different, or in some cases, no democratic process.

So I would say for me that is really an area where we’ve often worked together, and that is dealing with the barriers that our communities face when trying to vote. In addition to the language barriers, or in some ways related to what I was just talking about, Asian Americans have long experienced voting discrimination, and this discrimination is rooted in the false stereotype of Asian Americans as outsiders, aliens, and perpetual foreigners. Based on this perception, we know that Asian Americans were long denied rights held by US citizens, including the ability to vote for most of the country’s existence, including a time period in which the community was the only community expressly prohibited by statute from entering this country. And this is all despite actually having a presence in the United States since the mid-1800s. So we see this discriminatory attitude towards Asian Americans running rampant throughout the political process, whether it’s verbal attacks that we’ve seen lobbied against Asian American candidates or voters, we’ve seen it through political ads that use racially discriminatory imagery or perceptions.

We can imagine that these types of incidents likely have a chilling effect on Asian-Americans willingness and desire to participate in the political process as the constant and consistent message they’re receiving is that they’re somehow un-American and not valued or eligible to vote and don’t belong. I think in our conversations, Michelle, it seems as though oftentimes voters with disabilities also can face that at the polls, much as Asian American voters when they go to vote can sometimes be stopped or questioned suspiciously as to whether or not they have a right to be there, or whether they should be allowed to vote. I think we’ve talked about voter challenges that can occur, whether that is challenges by third parties or challenges by poll workers. And that is something that we have worked together on and produced Know Your Rights Fact sheets about for both of our communities, recognizing that our communities are often the ones that are targeted for suspicion, for questioning whether or not we should actually be allowed to cast a ballot.

So I think for advocates in the disability community what to look for, I think a lot of what we do is work to support one another because often it’s our communities that can be left behind when advances are being sought. And I don’t say that it’s an intentional leaving behind. It’s not as though people within our communities, our allies are targeting. Certainly we know there are others outside of our allies and our communities that are targeting our population. But even within, I’d say that what ends up happening is that it can be a little bit more difficult or a little bit more costly to try to address the needs for our communities, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. And what we sometimes come across is the desire to advance a policy, and that desire to get something done sooner rather than later makes it a little bit easier for people to put the harder pieces to the side, and say, “We’ll deal with that later.”

And unfortunately, what happens is that it doesn’t get dealt with later. And what we see is that as policies continue to advance, our communities continue to get left further and further behind. It’s not a stagnant; it’s not a status quo for our communities. If others are being advanced, then by standing still, we are actually falling behind. And that’s something that is just not acceptable.

And so I know that certainly when I am looking at voting policy works, and as I know you often do, we will raise issues for each other if we don’t happen to be in the room, and suggest that the other person’s community be engaged in the discussion because it’s important that when people are working on policy and don’t need to think about those who may have additional needs that must be addressed, that they don’t think about it. So it’s important that we hold them accountable and remind them, “Hey, are you making sure you’re checking in with folks who represent those with limited English proficiency? Are you checking in with people who represent voters with disability?” Right? “Are you making sure that these policies that you are seeking to advance are ones that actually benefit everybody, particularly those that may have the greatest need or have been the ones that have been left behind the most often?”

Thank you, Terry. I was hoping that you could share with us where our listeners can learn more.

Sure. So I invite people to come visit our website at advancingjustice-aajc.org. From there, you’ll find information about my organization. We are a national nonprofit C3 whose mission is to protect and advance the human and civil rights of Asian Americans and to build a fair and equitable society for all. From that website, you can see the different programmatic areas that we cover. So I cover census and voting, but we also have a tech and telecom team, an anti-Asian hate portfolio, a litigation team. We have a growing community engagement, a field team. We also do work around education, immigration, affirmative action, and so much more. So I definitely invite people to come, and from our website you can connect with our other social media platforms, where we are providing information to interested community members, whether that’s more in the action alert side about how you can get involved, or as I mentioned some know your rights information fact sheets.

One thing that we certainly do on our end, and going back to the previous question, something that people can think about is when we produce community education materials, we make sure to do so in multiple languages when we can. We certainly have a high premium on making sure our materials are translated. For the 2022 election, we translated our materials into 13 non-English languages, and we make sure to provide that. Additionally, I will say, and I’m not saying that we can’t do a better job, and we’ll strive to continue to do that, is when we are looking at our materials, we also try to make sure that they are accessible for readers with disabilities. So Michelle has had the joy of me sending things to ask whether or not we are hitting the mark, and it’s something that definitely I know that we can do a better job, and we will certainly continue to work to make sure that what we’re doing is accessible to all the different members in our community.

Thank you so much, Terry, for joining us and for expanding our knowledge and insight of comrades in the field, people with whom we should be standing alongside. Your time and efforts are very much appreciated, and I just want to thank you on behalf of our podcast and DRN and the PNA network. Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much, Terry. And now for our spotlight story with Mia Ives-Rublee about her experiences as an Asian American woman with a disability.

Yeah, hey, my name is Mia Ives-Rublee. I am a Korean American adoptee who also has a disability, and I had an interesting experience growing up because I was an adoptee, so my experience as a Korean disabled woman is a bit different from the typical experience because my parents were white. And so I didn’t really have a really good sense of what it meant to be an Asian American growing up. My parents, I don’t think they were exactly prepared to raise a daughter who was a different race of them. They don’t give parents a handbook anyway, but they definitely don’t give adoptive parents a handbook on how to deal with the structures outside of the family that a child will face while growing up and becoming an adult.

So my parents, they tried their best. They sent me to Korean school, and I actually left because I got bullied because I didn’t speak Korean. And we went to a couple of cultural festivals and some theater shows, but I didn’t really have a good understanding of what it meant to be Asian American as a child. What I did understand quite fluently was what it meant to have a disability. It always felt like my disability came first in terms of my identity growing up. My parents were rabid activists and advocates for me. They made sure that the school took my rights into account. There were many days that my parents would storm into the school and argue with the principal, or argue with the teacher, or even argue with the county to ensure that I got access to things like accessible school buses, the ability to take certain classes, et cetera. And so for me, again, disability was sort of on the forefront of my mind growing up in terms of identity.

And then I went to… And there weren’t that many Asian Americans in my school. There was one Korean girl that I remember meeting in high school, and then there were some South Asians as well that I went to school with. But in terms of folks I had a lot of interactions with, I just didn’t have a lot to go off of. And so it wasn’t until I hit college that I decided to take it upon myself to actually do some sort of digging and reconnecting with that part of myself. And I think that sort of got kicked off by a friend of mine who I did acting with, and she was talking about some of the stereotypes that Asian Americans faced, and I was like, “Oh, wait. These are the things that I’m facing. These are the things that I experienced growing up as a child.”

I remember people making fun of my eyes. I remember them making fun of my hair, and getting told that I spoke English well, et cetera, and people talking to me about karate, and martial arts, and stuff like that. I remember that, but I just didn’t have the words to talk about my discomfort in it because I knew that people were stereotyping me, but I didn’t understand why. And it wasn’t until I met this friend in college who was talking about her experiences that I was like, “Oh, so this is what it means to be an Asian in America,” and that experience of reconnecting with her and with others was huge for me because, again, I just didn’t have that at growing up. And I continued to sort of do some background research and reconnect with folks in the Asian American community.

It had to be very intentional on my part to try and make sure that I did get connected, and I just can’t thank my friends enough for taking me under their wing, and teaching me everything, and really including me in a lot of the events and activities that they like to do, including celebrating Lunar New Years and doing all of these other fun events with AAPI organizations.

And then I actually got the awesome opportunity to do some campaign work in North Carolina, doing outreach to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. And it gave me a chance to just sit in communities, communities that I sort of lived near, but never got to really interact with as a child. I got to go and interview them and talk to them about their experiences and the concerns that they had, et cetera. And it was just an awesome experience to get to do that in my home state. And then I got to go down to Georgia and do that again. And it’s just such a unique opportunity to sort of reconnect with things, and to better understand folks who look like you, and who have similar experiences to you. And so all of that was an amazing experience.

And then I got the opportunity to join the Presidential Advisory Commission on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders and have gotten to hear even more about different experiences across the AANHPI community is such a broad community. Over 60 to 80 different ethnicities and cultures go within that title of Asian American, and so it’s been an amazing journey. I wish it hadn’t been so hard to get reconnected and figure out who I was. And lately I’ve been able to talk about what it means to be an Asian American with a disability, and I think that puts another sort of color or another tint to the lens that I work with in terms of being able to talk about the stigma of disability in Asian American communities, and talking about how we address it to ensure that kids like me get to grow up feeling empowered, and feeling like they have people that they can look up to as they’re growing up.

Mia, as we take this month to reflect on the disability community and the Asian American community and where it is that we meet, it’s so powerful to just hear you talk about the importance of community and finding community in your life, so just thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

Yeah, I’m so glad to have been able to share my story.

We want to thank our speakers today for being real with us and reminding us about the diversity of the disability experience.

Yes, absolutely. First of all, for the realness, because if anybody keeps it real, it’s definitely Terry and Mia, but also just that reminder that the disability community is so big and so diverse, and we are not all one color, we are not all one religion, we are not all one gender identity or sexual orientation. We don’t even all have the same disability. It’s such a large community, and there’s so much intersection between all of those identities that really create the disability experience.

And as we fade from our real talk, we’re going to fade into some joke talk. Stephanie, it’s all you.

Oh, my gosh. Can we start calling it Joke Talk? Jack, I’m going to record a jingle, and I’ll send it to you for next month.

Please don’t do that.

You have been promising me jingles for months.

Well, okay. I need to do that.

Speaking of realness.

That’s fair. [inaudible 00:32:13].

I want the jingles!

I know, I know. I deserve the shit, but okay, we need to figure out… We’ll do this offline, but we’ll figure out the list of jingles that you want, so that I can send you a comprehensive album.

Realness. Jack just totally called Stephanie out, first of all, for promising all these jingles. That was amazing. Also, I’m pretty sure I Want The Jingles is now the name of this episode.

Yes.

Okay, I’m done.

Okay, so I actually have an announcement rather than a joke this time.

Plot twist.

Yes, yes. So for those of you who don’t know, I have a guide dog, and her name is Nala. And Nala is a Labrador golden retriever mix, and she loves Michelle, and she loves Raquel and yes.

Me and Nala, we are besties. Besties for life, me and Nala. Yes.

Does Nala not like me?

No, Nala loves you too! But I always… Michelle and Raquel rhyme. She also loves producer Jack, always wants belly rubs whenever he comes by, and literally will wag her tail if he comes by and doesn’t stop by. She’s like, “Hello?”

Good save, Stephanie. Good save. Good save.

No, no, no. It’s the truth. But anyway, so when we’re not at the office, Nala gets really lonely, and so I’ve decided that I’m going to get Nala a pet, and I’m going to get her a pet frog. You want to know why?

I’m so scared of where this is going, but yes.

Because… Okay. Well, the frog is very likely… Studies show that the frog is very likely to find my jokes ribbeting.

That was…

Oh, my God.

So much lead up for that joke.

Jack, [inaudible 00:33:53]. (Laughs) I’ve been practicing that one for a week. Okay.

This whole episode broke my brain.

Okay, I just made Michelle laugh. She is smiling, guys.

Oh, that’s so bad. All right, well now that is out of the way, we also want to take a moment to, of course, plug NDRN’s annual in-person conference that is coming up next month. The first week of June, we are going to be in lovely Phoenix, Arizona, and we will make sure that the link to check that out and get more details is in the show notes. All of us will be there, and you know you totally want to meet us in person.

Yes. I was just going to give a plug for the public policy session because all the cool kids are going to be there, so don’t forget to sign up for that. Okay, thanks. Bye.

All right. And you can follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We lost the blue check, but we are still there. You can also…

I promise it’s still really us, even without the blue check. It’s still us.

And you can visit our website, www.ndrn.org to keep up with all the great things we’re doing. See you next time, folks.