Q&A with Don Samuels

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.