Robin D.G. Kelley

In the context of the 1992 Los Angeles riots (following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the March 3, 1991, beating of Rodney King), Robin D.G. Kelley finds that gangsta rap is a necessary and inevitable (if also often flawed) response to continued racial inequities in America's urban centers. The Los Angeles riots were not the first time that racial tensions had erupted in America's cities, and Kelley, a professor of history and Africana studies at New York University, traces gangsta rap's development as an expression of resistance to the economic and racial inequality that brought high unemployment, epidemic drug use, and gang violence to Los Angeles during the last third of the twentieth century.