Written in solitary confinement, Kody Scott's memoir of sixteen years as a gangbanger in Los Angeles was a searing best-seller and became a classic, published in ten languages, with more than 300,000 copies in print in the United States alone. After pumping eight blasts from a sawed-off shotgun at a group of rival gang members, twelve-year-old Kody Scott was initiated into the L.A. gang the Crips. He quickly matured into one of the most formidable Crip combat soldiers, earning the name -Monster- for committing acts of brutality and violence that repulsed even his fellow gang members. When the...

This collection of writings by Sanyika Shakur, formerly known as Monster Kody Scott, includes several essays written from within the infamous Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in the period around the historic 2011 California prisoners' hunger strike, as well as two interviews conducted just before and after his release in Black August 2012.

Shakur rejects the easy answers and false solutions of the neocolonial age--integration and racism, the colonial-criminal mentality and subservience to imperialism--as the "oppo-sames" that they are. Firmly rooted in the New Afrikan Communist...