Open Your Eyes deals honestly with the underlying issues that continue to impede widespread cultural and societal progress in the African-American (A-A) community in the 21st century. These underlying issues are, in large part, the exacerbation of deep and misguided self-inflicted wounds often orchestrated from outside of the community itself. It demystifies the essential dialogue that must take place within the A-A Community about the dire need for an intra-course correction to one of self-reliance, self -worth, self-sustainability, and the critical necessity to stop engaging in actions that are self-destructive to each other and our communities. Instead to unite and start building more economically viable families and communities underpinned on the principal of umoja. Lasting and true change must come from within the culture and community.
To initiate this change, we must acknowledge this internal self-destruction is the cancer eating away at the very fiber of the community, and if it remains unabated will ultimately lead to our genocide. This work extends a concerted invitation to examine our own truth and to finally begin to solve our own problems relying on the fortitude and invincibility we inherited from our ancestors. The A-A community is poised for a much needed genuine and honest look at the man in the mirror as we embrace and understand our truth.
To openly and honestly see and examine “the Man in the Mirror,” we must first Open Your Eyes and be willing to lay bare our truths. Only then can we self-evaluate with the required veracity to admit our failures, ignite transformation from within ourselves, our culture and community. Then, we will engender individual accountability and collectively propel our community to pull itself up by its bootstraps and cease to engage in self-defeatism deliberately underwritten by our inhumane treatments after being stolen by terrorists from our Motherland.
For example, since the end of the Civil War our community has withstood many external pressures starting with the misappropriation of land and property to former slaves in the states that deserted the Union, the Federal Sanctioning of the Racist Reconstruction of the South, Vagrancy laws, Convict Leasing, Segregation, limited access to public education, Red Lining, and the denial of equal and voting rights at every turn. This extensive menu of cruel, inhumane, and wicked treatments distracted our mental focus on the concerted and brazen efforts to undermine the AA family and its values, even to this very day. By focusing much of our efforts on the external misdeeds against us, we failed to see that the figure in the mirror needed deep healing and would go on to endure multi-generationally transmitted residual scaring and baggage that today is crippling grassroots self-sustainability, focusing on and demanding educational excellence from our children, and the building of thriving A-A communities even in many urban areas with long A-A histories.
This work identifies the residual baggage, its generational transmittal qualities with devastating impacts on A-A people and communities; and exposes how those who wish us ill will uses this residual baggage to encourage our demise encapsulated in self-defeatism. Most importantly, it opens eyes to individual and collective self-healing of the community at large.
