Real Eyez (BOOK REVIEW)
Real Eyez:
Race, Reality and Politics in 21st Century
Popular Culture
by Anthony Asadullah Samad, Ph.D.
Kabili Press
Kindle Edition, $6.99
Hardcover, $20.00
364 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9723880-4-7
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“America’s
oldest dilemmas are rooted in race realities that it, as a nation and as a
society, refuses to confront. Is race the dilemma of the 21st
Century, in the same way it was for the 19th and 20th
Centuries?
Will
the complications of race, and its output, racism, allow the country to move
forward, or will it hold it back—because society refuses to let go of outdated
values and attitudes? These are all questions this book seeks to confront,
critique and analyze...
Whether
we like it or not, 21st Century reality is here… The ‘real world’ is
not going anywhere… It’s time for black America
to get real about who it is, what it has become and whether America is ever
going to deal with black people in an equitable and humane fashion.
It’s
time for all of us to get real.”
--
Excerpted from the Introduction (pgs. iii-iv)
Professor
Anthony Asadullah Samad has long been a brother with his finger on the pulse,
not only as a Professor of Political Science and African-American Studies, but
as a nationally-syndicated columnist and author of several best-selling books.
In his latest work, Real Eyez: Race, Reality and Politics in 21st
Century Popular Culture, Dr. Samad again turns his attention to the plight of
blacks in America,
but with present-day prerogatives in mind.
For, as he
astutely observes, “We are no longer a nation that sees things in just black
and white,” since “our world is now black, brown, red, yellow and white.”
Consequently, the new millennium has been marked by a host of cultural changes,
many of which have been lost on unsuspecting people still playing by the old
rules.
Real Eyez
is an attempt by the author to shake black America out of the doldrums and
have it face up to its moral drift as well as assorted paradigm shifts. For
example, he argues that the election of George W. Bush ushered in an era of
“Anti-Intellectual Narcissism” during which the country became dumber, greedier
and more boastful.
In a chapter entitled “America’s
Unbe-weavable Identity Crisis” Samad sheds light on what he calls “the weave
phenomenon,” bemoaning weave-wearing sisters’ embrace of a European hair aesthetic
which affects their “very psyche of beauty consciousness.” He says that black
women, “in their color diversity and breadth of complexion and body types,”
already represent some of the most beautiful, natural species on the face of
the Earth.
Other topics addressed include the
mega-church/microwave religion movement, the resurrection of the Civil Rights
Movement, Negrophobia, hypersexuality, President Obama as an anti-hero in an
anti-realism age, and the Occupy Movement’s refusal to recast the American
Dream. Curiously, this thought-provoking opus’ closing chapters are devoted to
a couple of late icons, Michael Jackson and Rodney King, and ends with a prayer
for justice for Trayvon Martin. A sobering and
enlightened take on the state of 21st Century African-Americana
courtesy by a fearless firebrand who has never been afraid to speak truth to
power.
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