The result is an outspoken and often courageous rejoinder to the pieties of race, class, and gender by a writer who is at once wise, bawdy, brutally funny, and as sensitive a lightning rod in a thunderstorm. In her text, No Disrespect, Sister Souljah seeks to dispel the generational root of confusion among minorities. Now she uses that voice to deliver what is at once a fiercely candid autobiography and a survival manual for any African American woman determined to keep her heart open and her integrity intact in modern America.Įach chapter of No Disrespect is devoted to someone who made a difference in Sister Souljah’s life-from the mother who raised her to the men who educated (and mis-educated) her about love-and each bares a controversial truth about the black condition in America: the disintegration of families the unremitting combat between the sexes and the thousand and one ways in which racism continues to circumscribe how African American people see themselves and treat one another. (Feb.Rapper, activist, and hip-hop rebel, Sister Souljah possesses the most passionate and articulate voice to emerge from the projects. Though Souljah's continual comments on Afrocentrism and white oppression are unfortunately Manichean, her closing advice to parents and to peers about successful relationships (``Remember: men will lie'') is, in the main, wisely cautionary. Her portraits of people-including a Muslim boyfriend fighting his homosexuality, a female classmate at Rutgers University casually manipulating men for money and a dream boyfriend who lies about having a wife-should strike a chord with peers.

Souljah's mom, admirably, encouraged her daughter's reading at an early age, and she grew-it's not too clear how-to gain a fervent sense of self and spirituality. Still, her story of childhood in the Bronx projects, where women on welfare accepted dissolute men as ``rentals,'' is chilling. ``What I am is natural and serious and as sensitive as an open nerve on an ice cube,'' declares Souljah at the outset, but her lightly edited vernacular tale-complete with large chunks of ``freely recreated'' dialogue-rarely has such style. This is a memoir of the author's surviving-the-ghetto life and her passionate relationships. Those seeking tales of Souljah's rap career-or the controversy in which candidate Bill Clinton condemned her statements about the Los Angeles riots-must look elsewhere.

No disrespect by sister souljah