Tupac Shakur: Political portrait of his mother’s son
Tupac Shakur was an inevitable product of his time. But his music could only have arisen from the revolutionary cradle of his mother’s fight for radical social justice.
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Tupac Shakur, like most Black men in America, was born into oppression. Even though Civil Rights had been won on paper, access to those rights were curtailed by structural racism. Even though prejudice had been de-codified, racism was concretized by the crushing sedimentary layers of White wealthy institutions laid down to smother every site of struggle over centuries.
Redlining was scrapped by the “Fair Housing Act”, but this did not prevent, or even disincentivize, the formation of ghettos. Black people no longer had to sit on the back of the bus, but Black people were still at the back of the queue when it came to social and economic opportunities.
The Four Horsemen of Capital – Stolen Land, The Political Elite, The Monopoly of Force, and the Financial Sector, were free riders in any of the Black neighbourhoods in the United States of America in the early 70’s. Pac’s birthplace – Brooklyn, New York was no different.
Tupac’s politics were a product of the time and pressure exerted on his and many other Black families. Had it not been for the oppressive forces of the US Government to police those born Black and poor, and to protect people born into privilege and White skin, organizations such as the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and various other organizations that fought to realize the freedoms for Black people would never have been formed.
The wealth that was plundered from Africa even extended to musical IP – Black music from “Negro spirituals”, the antecedent of the Blues, was stolen by White men who rebranded it as rock ‘n roll. Entire genres, songs, hooks, and lyrics were blatantly plagiarized by White producers. Music pioneers like Ledbelly, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and later the Motown sound created by Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, Lamont Dozier, Brian Holland, and Eddie Holland were the self-starter backlash against the White expropriation of Black Culture. Music released by Death Row Records, Def Jam Records, and artists such as Tupac Shakur was no different.
Before the Disneyfication of rap and hip hop, those forms were the great organic sounds of protest, the soundtrack to trigger White moral panic, and a form of artistic expression that broke the mold of 1980’s hair band domination. Hip hop was inherently political. Because the social circumstances that incubated it was a political construct.
This was a time when uncaptured hip hop was perceived as a genuine threat to White suburban culture. Black youths in baggy trousers were a sign of irreversible moral decay. White patriarchal culture suddenly “white knighted” for women’s in rights in faux offence of too many instances of the word “bitches” in tracks. Even as late as 2005, the NBA imposed a dress code to disassociate its players and teams from even the remotest tangential association with “hip hop” culture. It was a Calvinistic backlash against the latest expression of Black counterculture – a thinly veiled iteration of outright racism.
Tupac was a warrior in this culture war. In many ways, he was the son of his mother.
Three years before Tupac was born, his mother, Afeni Shakur was arrested with twenty other members of the Black Panthers and charged with frivolous charges to bomb police stations. This was just another example of institutional intimidation of those who protested against White power in after the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It was a counterattack by the final vestiges of racism against universal human rights. Ideals sacrificed on the altar of institutional deference to the conservative and reactionary securocrats like FBI Director, J Edgar Hoover, CIA Directors John Alexander McCone and Richard Helms, and the Cold Warriors who packed the State Department like sardines in a crushed tin box.
Bail for the accused was set at $100 000, an extortionately high bond designed to keep them in prison. The Black Panthers raised the funds to bail Afeni Shakur to allow her to raise funds for the bond and legal defence of her comrades. The marathon trail lasted from February 1970 to May 1971. Afeni Shakur defended herself, and said of her performance in court:
“I was young. I was arrogant. And I was brilliant in court… because I thought this was the last time I could speak. The last time before they locked me up forever… I was writing my own obituary.”
The Panther 21 were acquitted in court. One month later, on the 16th of June 1971, Tupac Shakur was born. Shakur would go on to sell 75 million records. His life would be documented by others, and his experiences journalized through his music. The political education that he would receive through experiencing life as a Black man and articulating these experiences through the lens of an artist would connect with people around the world. It is a grievous loss to the world that such a bright flame would be extinguished on the 13th of September 1996.
*Roscoe Palm is the co-founder of PAIS
