post#5 interview with Daisy Kinard

I found all of the four interviews interesting and related to the course texts we had so far. I choose the one with Daisy Kinard because she seems to be an open person.

In my opinion Richard Lieberman by interviewing Daisy is trying to picture the reality of teenage African-American girl in the time of World War II and what's even more significant in her case, the racial segregation between the whites and the blacks. He also looks for motives that made her moved from the south part of the country to NYC and I see him trying to compare the reality of living between North Carolina and a northern state like New York.

Daisy answers the questions pretty openly, she tells the story of her youth, when she worked 16 hours a day for a minimum wage, where the education was a privilege mostly for white kids, what relates to the discrimination she experienced as a African-American. She decided to move to New York because she was looking for a better life and she's been told that in New York ”the white people speak to you, and they treat you nice. And they ride on the same train”. It was a fantasy for her to be in a place like that. The differences between her hometown and New York were noticeable, not only the good way. She has been disappointed when she first arrives in the Big Apple but as of the time of the interview 1978, about 10 years after civil right movement had a place, she seems to be satisfied with her achievements. I assume that she became a student of LaGuardia and that she liked New York for the integration you find here.

I see couple of things in this interview that can relate to our class materials. First of all the racial discrimination brings me to the presidential speech “A More Perfect Union”, about the role of race in the United States. Barack Obama mentions William Fulkner words, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past”. Daisy Kinard is the real example of the past and the best of achieving the goals with determination that grew in her through the unpleasant life experience. From my point of view there is connection between Daisy and Wal-Mart workers from the movie “The High Cost of Low Price” and from Karen’s Olsson article “Up Against Wal-Mart”, what I see they have in common besides the minimum salaries are the extremely hard situations on a job that they are expose to, for example by working for so many hours. There is one more connection I found reading the interview, related to “Confronting Inequality” by Paul Krugman. When it comes to status the interviewee tells us how important is, in cities like New York, to find a social class that each of us belongs to and fit in.