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Joan Morgan is awesome. Many years ago, I bought this book simply because I knew Morgan's byline and well, because I figured I would relate. What I found between the pages of Joan Morgan's When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks It Down was sheer brilliance.

Sure, there were some aspects I could relate to like the conflict between being a black woman and down for the cause at it were but still cherishing a culture that in some aspects, doesn't seem to see women as human at all. But there was also a lot that I learned about other people's perspectives, about the very real role that love plays in bad decision-making and obviously, about American hip hop. Through personal anecdotes (she's truthful about flaws and really funny) and statistical research, Morgan - whom you may have also seen in the My Mic Sounds Nice documentary about women in hip hop - really does break it down. I guess Amazon's synopsis can give you a better idea:

In this fresh, funky, and ferociously honest book, award-winning journalist Joan Morgan bravely probes the complex issues facing African-American women in today's world: a world where feminists often have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men; where women who treasure their independence often prefer men who pick up the tab; and where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds black women who long for marriage that traditional nuclear families are a reality for less than 40 percent of the African-American population.

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