Q&A with Don Samuels

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.