Taylor the Teacher

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This is a paper I wrote for a class I took in my Master’s Program called “Life of Tupac Shakur.” I found the class interesting, and thought I’d publish some of what I learned.

The year 1971 was a hell of a year to be born for anyone (I know, since I was born two weeks after Tupac). For Tupac Shakur, the conflicts and turmoil that embattled our nation during this time were more than mere curiosities; they were the organic realities of his life. Since his mother was in jail while she was pregnant with Tupac, he has been known to say that his embryo was in jail. He was doing time before he ever saw the light of this world. This is the eerie foreshadowing of the time that he would spend in jail himself, but more importantly, jail became the defining metaphor of his life.

By the time Afeni Shakur was acquitted of the 156 felonies she had been charged with, her involvement with the Black Panther Party and the New York 21 had already had a profound effect on the future, albeit in an unforeseen way. As her son grew, he took an interest and an ambivalent pride in his “revolutionary pedigree.” In the year of his birth, the prison rebellion at Attica had been brutally put down by the government, and Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago Black Panther Party was shot in his bed. Both George Jackson, the black leader shot in jail in 1971 which sparked the prison rebellion, and Fred Hampton represented hope to the black freedom movement. Both were sent to early graves by a government indifferent to the reasons for either the Black Panther Party or the prison rebellion.

Growing up the son of a revolutionary put Tupac in a paradoxical position. The revolution was no longer active, but the injustices remained. Those who had known Afeni and seen Tupac as a child were aware of his background, which meant Pac had additional burdens and aspirations in addition to the struggles he faced growing up poor and abandoned by his father. Afeni continued to suffer as a result of her involvement with the Black Panther Party for years after she was no longer active. Tupac struggled with the competing ambitions to live up to the “revolutionary pedigree” of his parents’ generation, and the desire for material wealth which characterized not only the hip-hop generation, but the entire United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Not only did he wrestle with his own motives, but the violent revolutionary tactics of the Black Panther Party had not succeeded, and Tupac surely would have heard stories of Hampton’s death and the humiliation suffered at the hands of Attica prison guards by those who dared to petition the government for better living conditions at the prison.

This, coupled with his artistic gifts, may have led Tupac to his decision to his “less violent, more silent” form of action against injustices. Michael Eric Dyson contends that rap is race war by other means. Indeed, Tupac’s lyrics suggest he viewed himself as part of a war when he said, “the world is a war zone,” and referred to himself and his generation as “souljas.”

The irony in all this is that it was the misogynistic and violent lyrics Tupac was known for, not for his political views, which served only to solidify the public’s image of the black male as fit only for a jail cell. Dyson says those who had never agreed with the tactics of the Black Panther Party simply interpreted Tupac’s life as confirmation of their view that Black Panther methods were simply self-destructive, not conducive to the stated goals of the party. For those who still supported the Panthers, Tupac was corrupted by the capitalistic sensibilities he was raised in.

These two competing interpretations of Tupac’s life neglect the vital truth: Tupac was Tupac, not the solution to their unanswered questions about the 1960s. The expectations placed on him caused him to live out his life in confining spaces. He was in jail in 1971 and in 1996. But every year in between he was confined by the poverty of his situation, his mother’s addiction, the suffering of American blacks, his father’s abandonment, and the conflicting emotions he had regarding his roots in the Black Panther Party. I believe Tupac would have grown to define his own struggle in the post-revolutionary era had he been given the chance to work things out for himself. He simply died too soon.