Respect Her Gangsta!: A Review of the Music of Elaine Brown

Abstract

Elaine Brown’s latest opus, The Condemnation of Little B (Boston: Beacon Press 2002), is an edifying text in which Brown examines the kangaroo trial of Atlanta youth Michael Lewis, while simultaneously revealing the depths of “New Age Racism” in “America,” or the current ideological, political, and socio-economic terrorism that sustains the condition which George Jackson refers to as neo-slavery in Soledad Brother (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), his collection of prison letters. Condemnation further succeeds as a caustic commentary on the Black “bourgeoisie,” in Atlanta and “America” at large, with its contrived ignorance or carefree posture (“it’s not my problem”) regarding disenfranchised Black youth who are conveniently sectioned away in any one of this country’s ghettoes.