Q&A with Don Samuels

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.