the joy of kendrick
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 or or, most recently, as the perpetually-trying-to-improve-himself Nathan on Maybe you’ve heard about BLD PWR, an organization 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
