Open Your Eyes: To a Clear Mind, Wise Actions, and a Life of Grit

Open Your Eyes is the first book to deal honestly with what is truly crippling the African-American (A-A) community today and that is itself. Open Your Eyes is an essential dialogue within the A-A Community about the dire need for an intra-course correction to one of self-reliance, self-sustainability, and the critical necessity to stop blaming, whining, self-destructing, and instead to unite and start building more economically viable families and communities. Without a doubt, internal self-destruction is cancer eating away at the very fiber of the A-A community, and if it remains unabated will ultimately lead to our genocide. This work extends a last-ditch 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.This much-needed invitation to have a genuine and honest look at the man in the mirror is the first step to understanding our truth. To honestly see "the Man in the Mirror," you must first Open Your Eyes. Only then can we self-evaluate with the required veracity to admit our failures, ignite transformation from within and thereby achieve individual accountability and collectively propel a community to pull itself up by its bootstraps. In previous works by distinguished authors, critically honest self-analysis has been intentionally or unfortunately omitted. Thus, we have failed to see that the figure in the mirror comes with multi-generationally transmitted residual scaring and baggage that is crippling grassroots self-sustainability, achieving equal justice under the law, 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 transmittal qualities and devastating impacts on the 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; and most importantly, it shares a process to individual and collective self-healing of the A-A people and by extension the community at large. Admittedly over the years, readers have continued to be presented with details about the struggles, abuses, misfortunes, injustices, and fights for Civil and Voting Rights. Most often, these works speak from the "woe is me" point of view highlighting or engaging in a commentary on the many injustices that have transpired since slavery (The Wicked Time). The common underlying goal(s) of most of these works were to force equality and acceptance based on the Constitution of the United States, to awaken racial guilt which never existed, try to bridge the social divide, or attempt to force equality and acceptance across the deliberately segregated institutions and thus unleash economic opportunities. While such commentary on the plight of A-As is notable, it never explains the ever-present self-destructive tendencies, high rates of failures to thrive, an epidemic of A-A crimes being committed against other A-As, the lack of constructive parenting in many homes; and for some, an over-dependence on Government handouts that spans generations. In instances of generational governmental dependency, adults fail their children and community by not living an example that teaches "the best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm."When juxtaposed with how most other cultures have done well and continue to do so in this country, the failures to thrive at the grassroots level of the A-A community is most alarming and puzzling. In many areas such as basic public education, there is life-crippling regression. Sadly, and alarmingly, for some urban communities and now showing up in rural areas, there is a basic lack of respect for A-A life. These failures are no longer acceptable and cannot be blamed on others. It is time to look inside our own homes and come to terms with what we are doing wrong or not doing at all.

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Hamilton, B. a. M. Ed Gps Facts L. Cook
Published: 09/25/2019
Publisher: Browker Identifer Services
ISBN: 9781733358224
Pages: 226
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 9.25h x 7.52w x 0.48d