The characters in the novel don't strike me as racist. They are segregated. There aren't many white people in the book, except a bar tender in New Jersey and one rich old boozer who gets clubbed over the head, but at that point in the book somebody had to get clubbed.

 The main character, Winter Santiaga, is a selfish 16 year old, who shops her way out of crisis after crisis. When she's down to her last thousand bucks she buys a $500 outfit as an "investment." She's fine looking, cold, calculating and tough, but naive. She doesn't crack under tremendous pressure. Her family is thrown off Mount Olympus into Hades but she keeps fighting. She knows how to go buck and apparently gives a decent blow job. (Relative to her friend Natalie who gives the best blow jobs in all of Brooklyn.) This book is what they call "a page turner." A literary crime novel with plenty of sex and violence.

 Souljah appears as a character in the middle of the book. She hangs out with a lot of hip hop superstars. She paints herself as a high principled activist running issue meetings for men and women in the community, hosts benefits and takes Winter to a prison to witness a speech she's making to a group of women. When they get to the prison they find out that all the women she'll be speaking to have HIV or AIDS. Most of the characters in this book seem to be homophobic (afraid of homosexuals.) Even Souljah, the college educated counselor isn't sure about getting close to these women with AIDS. "They say you can't catch it except through the blood or bodily fluids. But I never trust what "they say."

 Winter sees the prisoners as lost causes "like the crackheads back in Brooklyn... Some of them had black eyes and blotches. Most of them had big ugly plaited braids, like dykes. They were in bad need of a hygiene and fashion rescue mission." Souljah goes on to tell the women that they are important to the community. She hugged them all and "shook their sweaty hands." Souljah wants to fix people from the inside out, and Winter thinks if the outside looks good everything else will fall into place.

 The phrase "I need a man who is all man" comes up a few times throughout the book. After a guy tells Winter "Man them niggas is so turned out on crack that they'll get on their knees and suck my dick just like a bitch for a hit of the pipe... Men got stronger jaws. That shit feels even better," she gets grossed out thinking, "The bottom line was, I was sitting next to a man who thought it was okay to let another man suck his dick. Somehow [he] figured only the crackhead is the homosexual... I can't take no man seriously who I gotta guess about sexually. I can't be seduced or excited by questionable masculinity. I need to know that my man is rugged and rough to the bone."

 In the context of Winter's world  it is clear that her disgust is phobia taught and perpetuated by those around her. It seems like a case of literature reflecting life, rather than literature trying to influence life.

 We also get a peek into Souljah's personal love quandary, when Midnight, a man who pulled himself up in the world by selling drugs, falls in love with the sister. She has to reject him because of the damage the crack he sells has had on the community.

 In the end everything falls apart and the young hoods take the place of the ones who are in prison or dead. The guiding philosophy of Winter's crime family seems to be "get it while you can," or "20 years of high living is better than a long life in the projects." Which makes sense in the same way as her initial controversial statement.

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