Second in a series
Re “Samad Inspects Changing State Through ‘Real Eyez’”
Two weeks after Newtown, and in the midst of a frenzied nationwide campaign to indiscriminately buy back nondescript, privately owned guns, Dr. Anthony Samad’s new book, “Real Eyez,” surveying radical cultural changes in America, seems unusually well-timed.
“We have become a more hostile society, largely due to the promotion of violence,” the scholarly Dr. Samad said last Thursday evening at his book launching party in Leimert Park Village.
“All of those things we have seen played out this year have come as a result of the world having changed and us not acknowledging it. We got shocked a couple weeks ago by Sandy Hook. But there have been 31 mass shootings since Columbine. Yet, we treat each one of them as anomaly when they are not. They are part of a more violent culture that is targeted with gun proliferation, a mass resistance to giving up weaponry, particularly military weaponry.
“We are a rude society. So we confront each other. We don’t defuse conflict like we once did. Diplomacy is waning in our society.”
At the grand old Regency West, just off Crenshaw Boulevard, Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, a prolific writer/author/college prof and commentator on the social/cultural/political scenes, speaking privately before the launch, employed steel-strength language but in a calm, soothing voice.
Do you conclude these upheavals have been good for black America, for black equality?
“I think the results have been mixed. The most visible change, of course, is that we have been able to elect an African American President.”
Has that been beneficial for the black community?
“It has been good in one way. In another, it has been sobering, largely because the most affluent, the most educated generation of black people have gone backwards quicker in the last 20 years than the first generation of slavery did after Reconstruction. The reason: Because of an adaptation of culture to dominant culture norms,” or assimilation.
“ They haven’t just assimilated,” Dr. Samad said, “but acculturated. That acculturation has not been a good thing for the African American community in terms of being able to institution-build, to build businesses, to build a communities.”
Are you saying that well-off blacks and well-off whites have become indistinguishable from each other?
“That is too simplistic. They are indistinguishable. But then you have a phenomenon like Oprah Winfrey. Until 2008, she had been seen as largely apolitical. She was seen as just Oprah. She was not seen as a black woman. She was seen as a cultural personality who has significant influence in our society, and still does.
“Look at someone like Michael Jackson. He was not seen as black or white. He was seen as a cultural footprint in the American popular culture – probably the biggest influence on American popular culture in the last 20 years of the 20th century.”
(To be continued)
