To the Editor: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People remains committed to our historic mandate to challenge racial exploitation, discrimination and bigotry.

Kara Elizabeth Walker, 27, of Providence, R.I., an artist who explores racial, physical and sexual exploitation, $190,000.

Set in a recording studio in Chicago in 1927, the play tells a rending story of racial exploitation and divisiveness involving Ma Rainey, "mother of the blues"; the four black members of her band, and the two white men who are her producer and manager.

Hip-hop loyalists, strongly aware of the racial exploitation that haunts rock's history, have long distrusted white artists who lay claim to the style.

The film, based on a Pulitzer Prize-nominated play of the same name, is an examination of one of modern America's darkest chapters of medical research and racial exploitation.

Suggestions that some of his comments constitute a kind of code verging on racial exploitation cause Mr. Silber to explode in indignation.

The white artists plundering hip-hop, like Kid Rock, seem eager to actually collaborate with artists of color; one can only hope that the racial exploitation that has marred rock history won't repeat itself.

The innate tragic grandeur and gritty, stinging humor of this story of racial exploitation and musicians at loggerheads can be discerned only in fitful flashes.

It makes its points about racial and sexual exploitation firmly and early and then treads water in contorted postures for two hours.

The author shows how slavery in the Deep South was fast succeeded by new forms of racial exploitation like Parchman Farm, a Mississippi prison that functioned like a plantation.