Editor’s Note: This piece originally ran during Tupac’s 40th birthday on June 16, 2011.
For the past month, in anticipation of what would have been another birthday for the rapper, I’ve become a obsessed with Tupac Shakur — torn between the very public shape-shifter that he was who scrawled THUG LIFE on his abdomen and the relatively young man who grew up without a father, and transitioned into manhood under the harshest of circumstances.
I became curious in Tupac insofar as he represents a litmus test on whether progress has been made in terms of reversing trends in black men’s life expectancy, incarceration numbers, and on the whole, having a more options for manhood beyond the archetypal Thug or Gangster or in the extreme opposite, the bourgie Negro devoid of a political consciousness.
For Tupac, and many black men, there’s little middle ground in terms of life choices: It’s life or death; college or prison; hardcore or soft; a thug or a (mentally insert expletive.) Contrary to mainstream media, Tupac Shakur was a complicated figure who had so much more to give the world, if only we lived in a world where black men aren’t made to feel lucky if they live long enough to collect social security.
Click here to view a Grio slideshow of rappers who were gone too soon
In an unofficial survey I conducted with a group of poets and writers, culture critics, and academics, I posed the question: If Tupac Shakur was still alive, what might he be doing?
R. Dwayne Betts, author of A Question of Freedom, opined “Hard question to answer. Hip-hop has become more materialistic. The reason why Pac still has a lasting impact is in part cause he was an enigma, embraced by black nationalists, street cats, women and girls alike. [. . .] if he were alive he’d have had to shift to the “Dear Mama,” and “Life Goes On” spectrum of his music and move away from “Hit Em Up” and “Thug Life.”
In stark contrast with Mr. Bett’s observations, numerous respondents believed if Tupac were still living he’d be doing time, given the violence present in his music and personal life.
His childhood friend, Jada Pinkett-Smith, in an interview recorded on YouTube, paints a decidedly more sensitive portrait of the late rapper in his formative years living in Baltimore. Pinkett-Smith says “He was one of my best friends. He was like a brother. It was beyond friendship for us. He was like a brother-father figure to me. We took really good care of each other.”
The day after his passing, the New York Times published an obituary of Shakur with the headline: TUPAC SHAKUR, 25, RAP PERFORMER WHO PERSONIFIED VIOLENCE, DIES.
More disconcerting than summing Tupac’s life in nine words is the glaring omission that if Tupac is the “personification of violence” it is only because he was shaped by an America that was founded on violence and perpetuates violence via its policies at home and abroad. At the risk of stating the obvious, the 1990s wasn’t exactly a hotbed for racial uplift concerning black men. If you can remember that far back, this was before we elected our first black president, a time where black men were the subjects of many ghetto-coming-of-age movies, and a time when violence was a top killer for black men who shared demographics similar to Tupac Shakur. This was also a time of rampant high profile abuses of power by police departments across the nation — Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, to name a few. There’s a long history of black men and violence that is missing from the headline.
The question “had Tupac lived today” remains part science fiction because that would require us to imagine an entirely different lived reality. That would mean the history of our nation would have had to unfold radically different to include a different sociological reality — one where a large portion of the population of young black people aren’t, more or less, disadvantaged economically, educationally, economically, health-wise from birth.
According to L. Lamar Wilson, a poet and academic, [If Tupac were still living] “he’d be in the studio, creating an album about his growing family and decrying the poverty, war and despair around him, as he’s always done. He’d give us something to think about concerning the Tea Party that should have been given for Shirley Sherrod on the White House lawn that would have silenced the Tea Party protesters outside it. He’d be giving Willow Smith advice on how to change the game. He’d, I pray, be evolved enough to call out homophobia in hip-hop.”
Imagining what life would be for Tupac, had he lived, is a tall order. One thing, we know for sure, however, is that if Tupac was allowed to embrace all the aspects of his humanity — the ones described by Jada Pinkett-Smith — he might have had a wider space to define and express his manhood without resorting to the glamorized violence that was so entrenched in 1990s hip—hop culture.
Had he lived, America, as we know it would have not exist. It’s difficult to even imagine such an America. In essence, we’re talking about an America without Slavery, Racism, where a black life is equal to a white one. Put another way, inequality in our society wouldn’t be race-based. History would have evolved very differently. But, as before mentioned, its all science fiction to imagine.
Perhaps one of the biggest lessons from Tupac Shakur’s passing comes from a moving poem performed by veteran actress Ruby Dee on the popular HBO program Def Poetry Jam, where she points out the significance of naming. She observes “Tupac spelled backwards means caput: meaning finished, done, over, ended, done.”
I wonder had Tupac were just Shakur meaning “thankful to God” in Arabic — for living past his mid-Twenties, passing on a legacy of revolutionary activism from his mother and Aunt, Assata Shakur, and passing on that tradition to his offspring instead of death. It would have been a better name than caput, wouldn’t you say?