Q&A with Don Samuels

In a year of violent crime and racial recriminations, north side Minneapolis City Council member Don Samuels, fifty-seven, has staked out a contrarian position on most of the hot-button issues—from crime to racial profiling to the value of white guilt. In an op-ed piece, he wrote that the north side is “suffocating under a tightly woven canopy of complicity between ultra-liberal whites and militant blacks.” We asked him to expound on the thesis.

This white liberal/black militant thing is a great conspiracy theory.
It’s interesting; the history of racism is such that it sets up a lot of guilt in the white community. And sometimes that guilt morphs into resentment and it’s not dealt with honestly. And it sets up the potential for a lot of anger in the black community. All of us, all black people, to some degree or the other have a little residual anger. And all white people to some degree or the other have some residual guilt. And so those are two human qualities which are designed to lead us to something positive. But in the hands of immature people, or people who are resistant to growth, and will defy even the facts, they become very destructive qualities. In terms of the black community, black people who are angry—as we all are to some degree—and are committed to a kind of more immature and anti-growth orientation in the world, they will look at the counter, which is white guilt, and say, “I’m going to use my anger at historic injustices to manipulate that guilt. And I’m going to use it within the black community to create a movement that I can lead. I’m going to tap into that anger at the white shame, and I’m going to manipulate it.” So that black leader is tapping into the black anger and white shame as a two-pronged kind of strategy. On the white side, you have this white person who is not necessarily looking for change, but is looking to alleviate their guilt. That’s their main motivation. So they’re thinking, “How can I alleviate my guilt? I just feel so bad about this situation.” I don’t know if you read in my letter to the editor about this guy Cap Catch who’s running for DFL. He got beat up canvassing on the North Side. He was on the news saying that he wasn’t going to press charges or encourage the cops to find the kids because he’s hoping that they will realize the trouble they’ve done by just watching him with his patch on his nose and see it as an opportunity to change their ways rather than getting in with the laws and all that kind of stuff. Now to me, that’s white liberal bullshit. OK. This person is not strategically looking to see how we’re going to change the minds of these hard-core young men. As a parent would. “What am I going to do about this stupid son I have?” They’re like, “Well, you know, they can’t do any better. I’m so guilty I can’t hold them accountable. I’m just a nice guy, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt these already hurt people. So let them destroy the world because we deserve it.” Whatever. It’s nasty and lazy. He’s a great dance partner for the angry black leader. They sit in a room and he goes, “Beat me, please beat me.” And he’ll go, “Yeah, I’ll beat you.” They’re going nowhere. They’re playing this ancient game, and they are having a wonderful time together but they are leading us down a path of destruction.

So do you feel patronized by Nick Coleman?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah! I mean, when I talk to people here, we’ve been so silenced by the militant component of the community which has defined militancy as racial sophistication. And anybody who is doing anything less radical or destructive is a sell-out. And any white person who is demanding accountability on the other side is a racist. So between these two feared labels of “Uncle Tom” and “Racist” they got us shut up.

So do you think that white liberalism is helpful or harmful at this point?
It’s harmful. It’s particularly harmful because the black community is actually the opposite of [liberal thinkers like Coleman]. The black community, within its own confines, is much less liberal, much less democratic than the white community. We don’t raise our children democratically, as white people do. Our churches are certainly not run as democratically as white people’s churches are. I can assure you that Reverend McAffee’s church is run much more autocratically than Nick Coleman’s church, if he goes to one. You don’t question what the pastor says. So here’s the paradox: you have the white liberal coming along interfacing with the leader of a community that is autocratically run, and it’s a joke. It’s a joke! There’s not a common thread of culture. Don’t you ever believe that. This guy keeps control of his group and he dictates what happens there. And then you have this liberal guy over here, “Well, nobody should be paid anything to anybody.” Oh, it will drive you crazy, the inconsistencies of this. And I’m not saying that autocratic style is not come by honestly. It’s firmly grounded in southern social politics and the southern way of life. You call everybody “sir.” And in the north, many black families will not allow children not to address an adult as “sir.” You never question your pastor. And this school teacher is like god. Those things don’t happen in the white community! In the black community, especially among poor blacks, that’s the way it is. So Nick Coleman’s way in the world is totally antithetical to the internal politics of the black community. But it’s totally consistent with the black community’s relationship with the white community in the last thirty years: Black community demands its rights in the political sphere from the white community. Demands accountability. Openness. Equality. But the irony of the whole thing is it’s not yet happening in the community!

So do you think those tenets of liberalism—questioning authority, ensuring individual rights—are harmful to the black community?
No, I don’t think they are harmful. In fact, I think our community would be better off if it grew in that direction. Because ours comes out of some oppressive cultural beginnings—in slavery and Jim Crow. There is a survival mechanism. I think as we grow and change as a community we will move in that direction. Certainly my family is moving in that direction. We’re struggling with it. It’s not easy. My kids are talking back to me. When we go around some families people are upset about it. And it’s like, “What’s happening with your kids? You should send them to live with me for two weeks.” Those kinds of things get said. So we’re struggling with it. It’s not easy. And the lump comes in my throat when I do certain things. Is my family going to survive this? Because this isn’t how I was raised. So Nick Coleman’s way in the world is totally antithetical to the internal politics of the black community. But it’s totally consistent with the black community’s relationship with the white community in the last thirty years. Black community demands its rights in the policies sphere from the white community. Demands accountability. Openness. Equality. But the irony of the whole thing is it’s not yet happening in the community!

So some of the things you mentioned in the letter—gangs, single motherhood, radicalized civil discourse, violent crime, multi-generational poverty, high unemployment rates—it seems like the black community has been demanding change from the white community for those problems. Is it time to look inward?
Oh, absolutely. You see, it’s tough for people to deal with two different things at the same time. Before the 1960s, the black community was preoccupied with its own cultural survival. How to behave in public. Whose face you stared in and when did you look down. You had to study your boss, what kind of mood is he in this morning? You would raise your children to do that. What the civil rights movement did was it brought the two communities into confrontation with each other. For the first time, black people were able to say—without being killed—“WE DEMAND!” Oh my god! Black people are saying we demand something and they’re not being killed? And that was incredibly galvanizing to the community. And it set up a new kind of rhetoric in a way in the world vis-à-vis white people for the first time. Cataclysmic. We can’t even understand. People who are fifty and above understand this. And I don’t even know how they put those two worlds together, frankly. But, what it did is, it kind of replaced, because people have a tough time doing two things at one time, it replaced and kind of subordinated internal reflection. Now we’re on this trajectory of holding white people accountable, which had its place at a particular point in time, but there needed to be a wholeness developed after that, and we haven’t gotten holistic. Now we’re just kind of holding white people accountable. There are some of us that will hold ourselves accountable in secret. We don’t want white people to hear that we’re having problems because they think that we’re half-human anyway, and then they’re going to use it against us and say, “See! I knew you had a problem!” So if we, for instance, were to say parents are not being as responsible—like Reverend Al Galman said, did you know Galman who was on the school board?—and he said a few years ago that black families are losing the value of prioritizing education. Oh my lord! They almost lynched him. It was revictimizing the victim. That’s the term. Revictimizing the victim. If you say something like that, then all of our efforts to hold the public school and the white power structure that controls it accountable for providing sound education for our kids. That we know that there has been routine prejudice and racism in the public school system. We know that! This is not defensible. If we do not keep our eyes on that path to the prize and hold white people accountable. If we begin to assume blame for some of it, what do you think white people are gonna do? They’re gonna say, “See? We don’t have to make any public schools better, because you guys aren’t emphasizing education at home. That is the real problem!” And in fact, Republicans are saying it every day. So they’re already saying it, so we’re going to become vulnerable. I’ll give you a good example. Some kids were fighting, I forgot what state, at a football game. And there were some big stabbings or something like that. They expel the kids. I don’t know if you remember this—years ago. Jesse Jackson came up and defended the kids from being expelled. And it was a national thing. And got them reinstated in the school. Now, chances are, Jesse was right. That their punishment was too harsh. I don’t know. I know if those kids were in my school I would’ve thrown them out. But it might be that if it happened to a white kid they would not have been thrown out. One thing I do know, at the end of the day, for the health of the black community, it is not good that the residual, lingering memory that we have of that is that a group of black teenagers did something awful and we turned it into an argument on race that we won on their behalf. The lasting impression of that and residual impression of that event should have been these guys did something terrible and they were appropriately punished. But in fact they became heroes in a way. A cause celebe. And that’s been happening in the community. Racism has so prioritized the appropriation of blaming. Sometimes even justifiably. That all lessons—the lessons that the black community needs to have learned from that incident were totally so subordinated that the lesson was trivialized. The white community has been held reasonably accountable and the black community hasn’t been at all. And it’s that paradox that is destroying our own introspective life as a community.

I was watching Tavis Smiley last spring and he made the point that in the economic rising tide of the last twenty years, all ethnic classes have ridden that wave other than the African-American community. So what’s your middle way through the ultra-liberals and the black radicals?
My middle way is both. This kind of mom-and-dad, kind of good cop/bad cop [game has] the Republicans and the Democrats playing with the lives of African Americans for their own ends. And it’s not very helpful at all. The Republicans are dad. They’re super dad. And the Democrats are mom. Super mom. And the roles are totally broken down to the male-female paradigm. And I think we are understanding now, in psychology now, that if you do that it is not healthy for a kid. That fathers need to be a little gentle. And moms need to be a little firm. Especially if dad dies. Mom has to be a little tough. And what’s been happening in the African-American community is that dad has died. For all intents and purposes, especially for poor black folks, there’s no dad. There’s no Republican Party influence. They themselves are not reaching in, and the black community is not reaching out to them. And so, it’s just Democrats. And this one-sided kind of thing driven by ultra-liberals is totally destroying our community. We’ve been loyal Democrats since the beginning. What the heck? And you haven’t done more for us yet? And then daddy is told never to come back home. We don’t want you. So Mr. Disciplinarian never gets a chance. Because now he’s a hardass and he wants to kick ass every time he gets through the door. So we need to get sane! Who’s the end product? Whose interest is this being done for? For your own party interests? Would you look at the end results? Your kid’s CRAZY! [Laughs.] So I think it’s time for us to come together and say there is a place for strong personal accountability and there’s a place for strong systemic accountability. And both must happen in equal proportions at all times. And white people shouldn’t be afraid to hold black people accountable. And black people shouldn’t be afraid to hold ourselves accountable because of black leadership that considers that betrayal. We all have to be open and we all have to be vulnerable and we all have to be accountable.

When Al Saunders called you a “house nigger” during your race against Natalie Johnson Lee, City Pages wrote, “Immigrants of color like Samuels represent diversity, and African Americans like Johnson Lee represent something far more complex, troubling, and intractable.” Do you agree?
In some general terms, that is true. But in specific terms, immigrants from certain slave colonies, immigrants of color, have a lot of the same experiences African Americans had. And certainly had it in their country. But once you come here, white people might say, “You’re an immigrant.” But back home, you were like black! And you knew that the lighter-skinned blacks and the white people still control everything. And they still do in Jamaica. If you go down to the tourist spots and see the people selling stuff on the side of the road, they are dark-skinned people. If you see the people running the hotel, they tend to light-skinned and white people. Still the same thing going on. Same repercussions, same trajectory. But once you land in America, white people become more comfortable with you as an immigrant. This is the truth. Because they hear an accent and they realize that there’s no baggage. Nobody in your family was lynched in the south. And there’s a chance that you don’t understand the complexities of race here. That you’re more open.

So do you consider yourself black?
Absolutely! I am absolutely black. And I understand why I am black too. I’m black because my white great-great-great-great-grandfather said I’m not white. [Laughs.] That’s the only reason I’m black! But I embrace it. First of all, because I don’t want to beg anybody to let me join them. And second of all, it allows me to help make the world a better place from a point in time and a place in culture. Everybody needs that to operate out of. And that’s what I’m operating out of while claiming all aspects of myself. I’m not going to deny that some corrupt slave owner ancestor that he is my daddy. OK? It’s just like saying my dad who beat my mom was my daddy. It’s not different than that. But to say he’s not my dad, I ran him off, I mean, that might make your mom happy, but it’s going to make you crazy. OK? And at some point we have to embrace all of our past and make sense of it—to let go of the destructive parts of it; to reject some of the destruction. But I accept the human person in it, but I reject his behavior. Now I look at you and I say, “Hey, cuz.” Now suddenly I become human more than just black. And I see a racist, and I see myself in him! And, oh, isn’t that scary.

Violent crime is up in Minneapolis by 15 percent to 35 percent depending on who you ask. What practical solutions do you have?
Well, first of all, we have to change the rhetoric of isolation. Where you’re white, you’re bad. I’m black, I’m good. There’s no such thing. So I can beat my wife and I’m still good. You love your wife, but you’re white so you’re bad. And what that leads to is corrupt leadership. Because there can be no examination within the community of virtue and leadership. No moral judgments can be made. Moral judgments can only be made of white people. So first of all we have to change the rhetoric and to be able to publicly hold ourselves accountable. And not buy into this whole don’t air your dirty laundry. It’s very unhealthy and it’s used to protect leaders with bad behavior. Nothing more. And that goes from the pedophile dad to the money-stealing leader. It protects all those guys. You don’t air your dirty laundry. Because when the kid misbehaves, the parent is telling everybody, “Did you know what he did?” OK. But when dad does something wrong, it’s don’t air your dirty laundry. It’s all a joke. So we gotta cut that out. Because guess what, Mary’s Place. Mary’s a white woman. Mary’s got 400 kids over there. The vast majority of them are black. All the teachers at the North High School—the vast majority—are white; vast majority of the kids are black. And North High, 28 percent of the black kids are succeeding. So Mary's Place! North High School! The jailors up in Stillwater. White jailors, black kids. The social workers around here. Talk about dirty laundry! Our dirty laundry. Not even to mention the rap music that's going off all over the world with our black women as hoochie mamas and our men as pimps. Talk about dirty laundry! This whole dirty laundry thing is such bullshit! Our dirty laundry is all over the world! So we have to cut out the pretense, and begin to talk about it and let it come out as deliberately exposed dirty laundry rather than dysfunctionally erupting dirty laundry. And say we have a problem in our community and now we can begin to talk about what’s happening with our families and with our children and we can speak to them openly without fear that we’re betraying anything.

Systemic issues like focusing on racial profiling. What about more cops on the street? Or cleaning up petty crime like loitering?  You wrote the loitering law.
Sure, there are systemic things, but there’s another level of systemic things that we’re not even dealing with. Some of it is related to the militancy of the black community. It plays itself out in the white community, but it’s related to the militancy of the black community. More cops. Loitering laws. Closing the alleys. Whatever. Those are all little surface things.

The council loves symbolism.
Yeah, it gets you elected. So within the community we need to change the rhetoric. We need to hold ourselves accountable. And young people on the street, like those kids in the football stands who fought, the first thing they’re hearing from us isn’t, “The white man fired you inappropriately.” But, “YOU’VE EMBARRASSED US! GET YOUR ASS IN LINE! DON’T BE A FOOL, YOU IDIOT!” You know? He needs to hear that. And then we quietly whisper, “Principal, please be fair.” But we should be PRE-occupied. The bible says, “Don’t take the moat out of your neighbor’s eye before you take the beam out of your own eye.” OK? So take the beam out of your family’s eye FFFFFIRST! So we need to have that conversation FFFFFIRST! I can’t stress that enough. So that our kids on the street—I’ve stopped kids down the street from my house that were selling drugs about six or eight years ago. I called them into a group. I tried to pretend as if I’m in charge so I can get an upper psychological edge. So I called all of these, about ten drug dealers, who were selling drugs on the corner, “Meet me in the middle of the road.” I said, “Guys, you’ve gotta stop this. I don’t want you in my neighborhood. Our neighbors don’t want you. You’ve got to go! You’re putting my children in danger.” Do you know what they said to me? They said, “Are you white?” They said, “Martin Luther King died in vain for people like you.” I can’t stress this enough: There’s a genuine illusion within the criminal black community that the larger black community supports them. Because they’re not hearing anything different. And they hear our militant stock. I kind of ramble, I’m sorry. So if we can get our pastors to begin to preach about these issues and we can get our teachers to begin to talk about these issues and we can get our white liberal teachers and social workers and columnists to back off this super tolerance for bad behavior on the basis that this is how black people are, and this is the best that we can do, then we can cut out that emotional culture of that problem. Now there are some systemic parts of it that have to change. The concentration of poverty is not tolerable. The city council and the county and the Met Council and the state have to begin to take specific measures to deconcentrate poverty. In giving incentives to outlying areas to increase their intake of the poor. And the whole community must begin to see the next step in the civil rights movement. We thought if we removed the barriers blacks and whites would just move toward each other in all directions. Well, what’s happened is black people are moving toward white people when they can do well, because that’s where the better schools are, et cetera, et cetera, and white people are moving toward more white people. [Laughs.] So we’re getting this rift, this concentration of poverty. So what used to happen by law and de facto racism is now happening by economics. And we have to begin to avert that, otherwise it’s the absolute same result. Which is isolated schools, isolated communities, disenfranchised, turning on themselves in pain.

You’ve lived elsewhere. Do you think the rhetoric is so strong in North Minneapolis because some of the systemic racism isn’t as strong here?
No, no, no. This community isn’t as historically racist. But it is now becoming as presently segregated. Like I said, and the end result is it doesn’t matter if your isolation came from de facto racism or a kind of socio-economic isolation largely driven by race, especially when it comes to white flight that’s happened in this town. Jordan moved from 65 percent white and 35 percent black in the 1990 census to 65 percent black and 35 percent white in 2000. In ten years. So white flight just sucked out that community. What’s happening now is that there is a kind of a primal ejection of those people. It’s almost that we allowed it to get so isolated that now the negative impact on the lives of the people that are so historically isolated, plus the influx of people from other isolated communities from around the country that are coming here, it’s reached a critical mass. Now you have thirteen-year-olds killing each other, and right next to the white middle class people moving in. The question is, Did it get so bad that it won’t recover because those people are going to get scared and run? Or is that influx going to be able to mitigate the social isolation enough to turn it around?

What can the city council do?
We can continue to be mature. We can’t buy into the rhetoric of the affordable housing advocacy that says, “We want to build affordable housing, no matter where.” Because that’s been happening here for the last few years. The land is cheaper here, there’s less resistance to the NIMBY, so you can build affordable housing all day long. So we’ve aggravated the isolation in this community. We must now begin to be mature and thoughtful and say we have enough affordable housing in this community we must STOP and do no more. And build them somewhere else. And spread the pain a little so everybody can bear it. Too many poor people living next to each other, too many unemployed people. Too many sex offenders living next to each other. It’s not tenable. And there are not enough middle-class people coming in, of any color, to mitigate that. So we have to stop it deliberately. And the Met Council has to begin to incentivize through its own infrastructural allotments around the metro. Incentivize communities with those investments to build and accept affordable housing. That’s at the heart of what’s really going to turn this thing around. Because if we leave it just to demand and supply and laissez faire economics, I’m telling you, our racial history, and our American dreamism—which is find a better school district with a better house—is going to destroy the dream itself. Exactly. And we vote less numbers, we’re less connected. It’s just not healthy. And some of those things have to be done on a systemic level—with the Met Council, the city, et cetera. So there are all these dimensions with the thing and some of them I’ve had little to do with. But maybe all of us together can raise our consciousness around these issues and have the systemic change happening while we do our internal evaluation. Now the police, the police are a minor player in this. They’re just going to prevent total chaos. But they’re not going to change culture. They’re not going to change hearts or minds. They’re not going to nuance anything. They’re going to take you downtown and lock you up for X amount of time.