Burning Down Don Samuels

“Leaders call for Samuels to resign,” read the headline on startribune.com. The city councilman is under fire for questioning the efficacy of North High, suggesting, with obvious and unarguable hyperbole, that it be “burned down" for its failures in graduating black males.

I edited the article in which Samuels spoke the words for which he is being pilloried. The salient question begged by “community leaders” (is everyone who holds a press conference in North Minneapolis a “community leader”?), Nick Coleman, and others is whether Don Samuels can call out members of his own community or its institutions yet still care about them.

Can anyone who speaks forcefully, and without regard for image-management, get a chance in our culture of cheap outrage? (I would argue Samuels’ outrage is not cheap, but deeply held.) The complex problem of failing inner city schools is worthy of our indignation. But we are focusing instead on a sound bite. Do we really have the luxury of that when it comes to educating our children?

This is not to say that North High is a failure, nor that it does not do well on behalf of many kids. But to focus on that and then build consensus hasn’t really helped the public schools in recent decades. Samuels’s political patron, Mayor R. T. Rybak, is a consensus-builder. R. T. got interested in the public schools for about fifteen minutes during the election. Then he moved on.

Rather than merely say “I care,” Samuels threw a firebomb. As a public school parent, I can say with some assuredness that the schools need more honest outrage from people in a position to make a difference. The forces that have endangered our public schools eat consensus-builders for lunch.

The point of David Brauer’s 4,000-word article that contained the “burn it down” phrase is that Don Samuels is a thoughtful, if occasionally intemperate man, impatient with the state of things in his part of town. He is the real deal in a trade that is all about posturing. If the folks in North Minneapolis want an ally to focus on school issues, they could do worse than Don Samuels. He will call-out all the players—from failing parents to a depraved peer culture, to poverty, to schools ill-equipped for the magnitude of the challenge they face. He will then get to work on solutions—that’s his MO.

Samuels is an equal opportunity offender focused on outcomes, not process. That doesn’t go down well in today’s politics, which is all about affirming your base, whatever its flaws.

But I suspect there is a larger Fifth Ward community—that doesn’t hold press conferences—that can see beyond this. Judging by how many of them have left the Minneapolis Public Schools over the last few years, I suspect Samuels may fulminate for a silent majority that speaks with its feet.

I would be proud to have someone of Don Samuels’ integrity representing my ward. But I imagine that’s not the kind of endorsement he needs right now. And I am pained, in a culture that rewards banality and victimhood, that an inflammatory bit of verbiage which contained an undeniable truth could conceivably undo an extremely promising public servant.

We in the magazine biz (and newspapers) love a story that gets read and talked about. But let’s get past the heat and move into some light.