How Justin Broke Through The Noise

Two millennials overcome physical barriers to emerge as local leaders:
• Activist Justin Farmer (top photo) prepares for elected office. (Click here for story.)
• Cantor Malachi Kanfer (at right) prepares for celebratory ​“installation.” (Click here for story.)

Farmer wears those headphones when he’s marching in labor and immigration-reform and social-justice protests in New Haven, such as one Wednesday on behalf of homeless people’s rights.

He also wore the headphones door to door in a successful quest to win the Democratic primary for a seat on Hamden’s Legislative Council.

Farmer, who’s 23, wasn’t wearing the headphones to listen to music. He wore them to keep noise out — because he suffers from Tourette syndrome.

He discovered he has the neurological disorder — characterized by involuntary, repetitive motor tics combined with a vocal tic — when he started having mini-seizures five years ago in reaction to noise.

At first he ignored the sudden energy build-up in his muscles, which felt like a budding sneeze ​“you need to get rid of.” Then one day at school, ​“a fire alarm went off,” Farmer recalled during an appearance on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. ​“I dropped to the ground and started convulsing.”

Since then he found the right medication as well as the noise-reduction headphones.

He said he didn’t mind having to explain the headphones when he went door to door seeking votes in last month’s Democratic primary for the Hamden Council’s 5th District seat. He decided to run in part to call attention to the needs of people with disabilities, he said.

“They made it easy for me,” Farmer said of voters he met on the doors. After explaining his illness, he spoke of running in part to support greater funding for special education in Hamden schools, which he grew up attending. ​“People were completely fine. They gave me time to earn their votes.”

“I have a genuine passion to help my community,” he said. ​“My disability shouldn’t get in the way.”

Part of a fast-growing progressive Democratic Party activist wing in Hamden, Farmer said he was inspired to run by President Trump’s insults against people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups. He made a point of noting how ​“plenty of people with disabilities” have held positions like … president of the United States. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for instance.)

Farmer now simply has to show up at the polls and vote for himself on Nov. 7 to win the seat, because the Republicans have not fielded a candidate in the race.

Farmer has been showing up for years in New Haven at rallies organized by Unidad Latina en Accion and Junta for Progressive Action, among other left-leaning groups. He grew up just over the Hamden border in the part of town with the biggest African-American population, an extenstion of New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood known to Farmer’s parents’ generation as ​“Highwood.” Farmer himself knew it as Newhallville, period. He didn’t notice a true border. ​“I grew up three blocks from the R” (New Haven’s Read Street) and Lincoln-Bassett School, he said. He heard the gunshots from the New Haven police training range on Sherman Parkway.

He experienced the distinctively Hamden parts of Hamden as well, and came to appreciate the ​“juxtaposition between the two communities.” He attended Spring Glen School. He worked as a camp counselor at Brooksvale Park.

But the similarities always struck him as much as the differences. Like being stopped for walking while black. (He doesn’t drive.) He said that New Haven and Hamden police have stopped him 16 times in the past three years. ​“Are you lost?” they’ve asked him. ​“Where are you going? Do you have a friend here?” He has heard that last question on the New Haven Green — and near his house in Hamden. His Tourette-spawned twitching only increases cops’ suspicion, he said. (Cops throughout the region have stopped him a total of 29 times over the three years, he said. Cops outside New Haven and Hamden have pulled a gun on him several times.)

New Haven and Hamden cops can both do better in practicing ​“community policing,” he noted. He also noted that gang violence takes place on both sides of the border.

As an elected official, Farmer (who is studying biology and political science at Southern Connecticut State University) said he hopes to promote a ​“progressive” agenda that increases awareness of how to deal with people from diverse backgrounds. ​“We need to have a place for everyone,” he said. ​“We need to talk about what a transformative community looks like.”

Born to Jamaican-American parents, Farmer noted that the two communities’ fates have become increasingly linked, and that Hamden’s nonwhite population — including African-Americans, Iranian-Americans — has grown. He also noted how New Haven’s and Hamden’s fates have become increasingly linked. As he expands his political profile, he said he hopes to help bring the two communities together. ​“I feel,” he said. ​“I have a home in both places.”

Click on the above audio file or the Facebook Live video below to hear the full WNHH FM ​“Dateline New Haven” interview with Justin Farmer as well as with homeless organizer Quentin Staggers.