[In the following review of Racism 101, Crockett argues that Giovanni accurately reflects African-American views on race.]

Poet Nikki Giovanni is caught up in the past and the future at the same time. In Racism 101, her latest collection of largely autobiographical essays, she describes herself as a '60s woman and a Star Trek fanatic. These two obsessions are like highway markers on her life's path, pointing the way to where she's been and where she's headed. Giovanni first captured the nation's attention as one of the most powerful voices in the black culture movement of the 1960s. Her work, then as now, is all about perspective—first as a black, next as a woman, then as an American, but ultimately as a human being in a complex universe.

Talking about Shakespeare in "I Plant Geraniums," she reflects: "Shouldn't we hold him to the same standards as the Constitution and Bible and bring him 'up to date'? I think not. I think we should leave him in the brilliance of his expression. We need, we modern artists and critics, to do exactly what Shakespeare did. Write for now. Think for now."

Before the '60s, most African Americans simply accepted our invisibility as a fact of life. During the '60s, voices like Giovanni's helped blacks and whites understand black contributions to the world. This was a new and an important revelation to the masses of blacks, and we took it personally in a way most whites could not. Virtually every black person in the U.S. who is old enough to remember the '60s, no matter where they hail from in the diaspora—the U.S., the Caribbean, Africa—fondly reminisces about those times.

Giovanni captures that spirit in Racism 101. Many whites may remember those days in negative terms—turmoil, civil unrest, deaths. While all that is true, many if not most blacks recall those days as a time when we did what we had to do to make America live up to its promises. "You must do, say and write that which you believe to be true," Giovanni notes. "What others think can be of no significance."

In Racism 101, Giovanni is teaching history. She reminds us that Rosa Parks; the catalyst in the Montgomery bus boycott that launched Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights career and the modern-day protest movement, "was not just a little old lady with tired feet. She was a moving force in the Montgomery NAACP." Giovanni recounts the authentic horror story of Emmett Tilt's death—the black boy from Chicago brutally lynched by whites in Mississippi. His mother insisted on an open casket, saying "I want the world to see what they did to my boy…. And the world was ashamed."

Giovanni bemoans black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and Clarence Thomas who've criticized affirmative action. "Clarence is against affirmative action? Shelby is against affirmative action? Since when? Since the people fought so that neither of these men would have to die for their choice of wives? So that Yale would admit a poor boy from Pin Point, Georgia? When did affirmative action become an insult? Shortly after you were granted tenure at your university? You don't like being made to feel you can't honestly do your job because affirmative action made someone hire you? There is a solution. Quit."

Giovanni says she laughs at the critics who say she is bitter and full of hate. She responds, "Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not envious or jealous either. I am just me … I do not measure my soul by the tape of the white world."

In various essays she delivers a message to African-American collegians, explores campus racism, and talks about her struggle for tenure. "Why did I agree to fight against those who so glibly dismissed my achievements—to whom my 16 books, my honors and awards, my 20 years in public life, simply didn't count?… Had I had the meager credentials that some of my tenured colleagues have, I would have been turned down … The biggest stumbling block to progress in America is still racism." Giovanni writes what most blacks know: Despite white denials to the contrary (after all, how would they know?), if you are black in America, no matter your economic standing, it's virtually impossible not to deal with racism at some point even in the 1990s.

Giovanni reminds us that as a people, we haven't reached our destination of equal opportunity. Here she's at her best, describing the achievements of the first black woman astronaut, Mae Carol Jemuson, or searching for answers to better understand lost youth. She is less convincing when she lambastes Spike Lee and gives him specific directions for rewriting his movie "X."

For an accomplished writer who celebrated her 50th birthday last year, Giovanni sometimes comes across as incredibly insecure. This is the same woman who gave us the signature poem "Ego Tripping"? But perhaps we're all entitled to our insecurities. She muses about why she has not yet received a "major" poetry award, and in one essay she continues, "I plant geraniums. No one will remember that. I have an allergy to tomato fuzz. No one will care. I write poetry and sometimes prose. No one will know me …" Surely that will never be true. We lovers of words and black culture will keep Nikki Giovanni alive and see that she gets her wish to have her work become required reading in colleges—and that she even becomes a question on "Jeopardy."