Profiles in Survival: Queenesia Wray

In his most recent "Profile in Survival", Yes! Weekly's Jordan Green profiles Queenesia Wray. Here is a portion of the profile, the full version of which can be found here:

On a recent Saturday afternoon she sat on the stoop of her cousin's house overlooking Ray Warren Homes. A New York native who earned her general equivalency degree at GTCC after dropping out during her sophomore year of high school, the 20-year-old Wray has held half a dozen jobs from food service to security and housecleaning, paying as little as $6 an hour and no more than $7.75.

"Black people struggle," she says. "We try to find the good jobs, but all the jobs are for seven-fifty or something. That's all that's out there."

She can say this from experience, having started her working life at the age of 16 selling books, knives and kitchen utensils on commission for Triad Star Co. Since then she's held fast-food jobs at Wendy's, Bojangles and Taco Bell, and cleaned apartments for the High Point Housing Authority. She quit her most recent job as a security guard because of her contention that the supervisor was demonstrating favoritism by allowing a cousin to shirk responsibilities.