Search Interviews

"When I was five, my mom and my aunt took me to a John Kerry rally in 2004 when he was running for president."

"My parents were pretty strict-- it's totally different than when I was a kid."

"When I moved to North Haven in 1965, and I realized that I was 'other'."

"Growing up in an Italian-Catholic family, with immigrant parents, immigrant grandparents, helped me to see the world through a blue-collar lens."

"How did your childhood shape your view of the world? The positive view of the world from my parents."

"I grew up in a house where there were so many pictures of John F. Kennedy that I thought he was a relative."

"My mother refused to rent a house to a physics professor with a PhD from Trinity because he was black, so I became very Liberal."

"I'm open minded. My mother said 'Just love everything. Exprience everything. Be open minded.'"

"I did not care in anyway about politics before I started thinking about where the world is headed and what it's gonna look like when my kids get older."

"I think, like, being around some racist people in college, and wanting to speak up about it kinda shaped my politics, and made me realize there's a lot to be done."

"I think that it was my neighborhood that helped me shape my politics,"

"Well, I had a really crappy childhood, so, I guess, taking my experiences from my childhood, I see the world differently."

"When I used to live in Virginia, there was a lot of homeless people where I used to live, so seeing that kinda shaped my politics."

"At this particular point, I'm very positive; I'm not very scared of anything."

"Political willpower sometimes isn't enough to trump some of those more urgent moments of inequality."

"An experience that shaped my politics would be growing up in Britain with parents with socialist ideas."

"The bombing of Cambodia in 1969 shaped my politics."

"My parents were one Republican, one Democrat. They argued at the dinner table all the time."

"I came from an all white area, and going there [UMBC] just opened my mind to other diversity which I had never encountered, which was very challenging but also very enlightening."

"What shaped my politics was the Black Panther Trial that went on here in New Haven in 1969,"

"Fragile. Life is fragile."

"Basically, what I got out of that experience was that racial harmony is a really important thing that can affect anyone."

"How do I encourage conversation across the divide, having been on both sides of it?"

"I think actually being named Samuel Adams was probably an experience that shaped my politics,"

"I grew up here in New Haven, and theres a lot of diversity in New Haven, and for the most part, I think we all get along pretty well."