It’s an early winter evening in Manhattan, and Kendrick Sampson and I are settling into a quiet if antiseptic corner of the James hotel lobby. Despite working on a single hour of sleep, Sampson, thirty-three, manages to look warm and cheerful in a pair of black sweats and a gray mask. Then just as we’ve dispensed with the small talk and are on the verge of getting to the good stuff, a white woman in a silver dress begins setting up shop not twenty feet from us. A lounge singer! She turns the volume up to eleven and warbles that a scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me.
Blessedly, when Sampson talks, it’s impossible not to listen.
You may know him from How to Get Away with Murder or The Vampire Diaries or, most recently, as the perpetually-trying-to-improve-himself Nathan on Insecure. Maybe you’ve heard about BLD PWR, an organization centered on abolition and mental wellness he cofounded that wants to train a new generation of entertainers and athletes to liberate communities from police violence, racism, structural inequality, the oppression of sexism, transphobia, capitalist violence, and the places where those intersect. Even if none of this rings a bell, you probably remember when, in 2020, cops shot him seven times with rubber bullets at a protest over the police killing of George Floyd.
When I mentioned to a full-time-activist friend who lives in L. A., like Sampson, that I was meeting with him, she was impressed and told me she had trouble recalling any action against police violence in the summer of 2020 where she hadn’t seen Sampson. He’s a guy who puts both his money and his body where his mouth is. Sampson speaks with ease and acuity about exploitation and justice—not to mention his own role in that of Hollywood, which he calls America’s “biggest propaganda machine.” He says his “mind works in systems.” It’s hard to overstate how nuanced his thinking is about liberation and what we owe one another.
This article appeared in the March 2022 issue of Esquire
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An example: Look around your community, he tells me, and ask, “Who are the vulnerable? Let’s start safety plans that center them.” Recognize that often the cops are the ones out here snatching and grabbing. That sometimes the most vulnerable people are cops’ targets. He holds my recording device up, wanting to be sure I’m getting all this over strains of Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly: “Whoever that most vulnerable person is. Just take a second every day and imagine what that world that supports that person really looks like.”
You know how sometimes people with a seriousness of purpose can be, to put this delicately, sort of a bad hang? That is not Kendrick Sampson. He regularly has a group of folks over for spades and once chased a bunch of his friends around a Denny’s late at night. These are union leaders, professors. Serious people. “And we act a damn fool,” he says. “We do a li’l butt shakin’, smoke a little weed, and we have a good time. . . . I think laughs and joy is essential to the revolution.”
It will come as no surprise that Sampson is no great fan of capitalism or its slickest trick: convincing us that our purpose and our passion are indistinct. “ ‘Our profit is our purpose’ is what capitalism boils down to,” he says. He worries people mistake their passion for their purpose. “You could be extremely excited, passionate about the piano. But I would really be disappointed if at the end of my life, I found out my purpose was a piano.” All of this, he says, makes kicking back impossible. So sometimes, Sampson says while leaning back, smiling brightly, “liberation is me leaning back on this couch and feeling great.”
It’s “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel now. Sampson knows every word. Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, looking for the places only they would know. “This is actually a really beautiful song,” he says.
An interruption. It’s the singer! “I’m so fucking sorry,” she says, “but I just want to tell you, I love your work.”
“Oh, oh, awesome,” he says. “I thought you heard me because I was like, ‘This is such a dope song.’ ” She shuffles back to her post, radiant, before launching into Muna’s “I Know a Place.” Sampson, noticing the time, says good-naturedly, “Let me get the fuck out of here.” We’ve been here twice as long as either of us intended. As he makes his way out of the lobby, the singer reminds us that maybe our purpose is to never give up when we’re on the right track.
