Here is an alternate version Bro. Kevin sent me himself.

What Is A Man? (Alas, Poor Tupac)

By KEVIN POWELL

The following piece is taken from Kevin Powell ’s 2003 best-selling essay collection, Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? Manhood, Race, and Power in America. Kevin Powell interviewed Tupac Shakur on several occasions while he was a senior writer at Vibe magazine, including what are widely considered the definitive articles and profiles on the late Tupac Shakur. To mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Shakur in September 1996, Powell is reprinting the following excerpt via the Internet.

….Tupac Shakur is a symbol of my generation’s angst and rage, and in death he is more famous than he was alive. Dead, he has sold far more records than he did alive, which says much about the worth of the breathing life of a Black man in America. Because of the controversies and misunderstandings that often surrounded his every move, Tupac Shakur—like James Dean and Donny Hathaway, or Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, or, yes, like Malcolm X—remains an enigma to many, many people. I cannot say that I really knew Tupac, although some people might think I did because of the many conversations I had with him. What I do know is that Tupac’s numerous public personalities were emblematic of Black men, both working-poor Black men and middle-class Black men, younger Black men and older Black men, and it is ludicrous to hear Black men of whatever ilk cruelly and crudely attack Tupac as if there are not elements of his plethora of personas riding through each of our psyches. If Tupac was angry and not able to tell the difference between proactive anger and reactive anger, I say, cousin, that is a gang of us. If Tupac displayed violent, me-against-the-world tendencies, he was only displaying a spirit I’ve seen in so many Black men in my travels across America—a spirit I have been forced to acknowledge within myself during the frequent full stops on my own life journey. If Tupac was one moment scholarly, then completely ignorant the next, well, hell, that is many of us as well—autodidacts and college grads alike, still looking for truth.

The point I am getting at is that most of us are as lost and contradictory as Tupac himself, forced to discover manhood through trial and error and odd angles—a father or stepfather here, an uncle there, a sports coach over here, some figure from popular culture (music, TV, or film) way over there. I am not trying to dis older Black men in America, but I can count on one hand the elder brothers I have met who:

• are seriously self-critical, the way Malcolm X was, even with his shortcomings
• are vehemently antipatriarchal and antisexist and thus willing to say that we need to think of some new and progressive ways of definining manhood, other than as conquerors and/or pimps, regardless of what form that conquering or pimping takes
• understand that manhood is a lot more than being or proclaiming oneself the man of the house, the breadwinner, the caretaker
• understand that manhood has everything to do with striving to be a whole human being, one who can be both hard and soft, loud and silent, courageous and vulnerable, and not afraid to show or admit these traits
• deem and relate to women as their equals, without hesitation
• are not locked, intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually, into a bygone era or a tired ideology

In other words, if most White men in America are stuck in a state of arrested development, I think it goes without saying that most Black men are as well, and that means all generations, not just the hiphop generation, son.

So when a Tupac Shakur comes along and says to his father’s generation, “I am your child,” implicit in that declaration is the notion that you cannot simply reject him as crazy or violent or death-wishing because, in point of fact, he is a mirror reflection of you, because he comes from your flesh, your blood, your bone, your sperm, man. What did you teach him, by your actions or inactions, by your presence, by your absence? What kind of manhood you got, where did you get it from, who said it was right, and why? And if, again, Tupac was born in New York City to a mother just out of prison, and was uncertain about who his natural father was, and moved from place to place in his truncated life, and watched his mother, a proud, strong, defiant woman, succumb to a debilitating crack addiction even with her genius and her political activist background, and was a sensitive child, with overtly feminine features and mannerisms, taunted by relatives, peers, neighbors, because he was “too pretty,” “too girlish”—why on God’s bloody earth would you expect this young Black male, who only made it to age twenty-five (go look and see what Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was doing at age twenty-five, then come back and holla at me, aiight?), to be anything other than what he was: a marvelously talented but appallingly schizophrenic and paranoid young man who drank too much, smoked too many cigarettes and too much marijuana, loved women but sometimes acted as if he abhorred them completely, and identified mightily with the poor and underprivileged but had no problem showing off his money, his cars, his clothes, and his jewelry because, fuh shizzle, who wants to be poor without end, particularly in a nation like America where the lifestyles of the rich and famous are rammed down our throats nearly every second via our television sets?

In a sense, then, Tupac Shakur represented—and represents, because God knows his spirit will never die, and because too many of us just won’t let the brother go—all that is right and all that is wrong with how we define manhood in America, and specifically what is so wickedly off-kilter about Black manhood in this new millennium, when the behaviors that define manhood are reduced to guns and violence, drugs and alcohol, the objectification and hatred of women, excessive materialism and extreme individualism, hate above love, insensitivity before butt-naked feelings, screwing instead of passionate lovemaking. Tupac Shakur once wrote a song called “Keep Ya Head Up,” an emotional anthem dedicated to Black women that bit a line from the chorus of a song his mother may have hummed as a young woman: Ooh child, things are gonna be easier. Tupac Shakur also allowed a woman to give him a blowjob in a New York City nightclub, left the club to have sex with her in his hotel room, then left that room when his homies barged in to run a train on that woman, becoming complicit in the worst sort of inhumanity.

No, for the record, I do not think that Tupac Shakur actually raped that young woman himself—never did, never will.

What I do feel happened, as Tupac told me in an infamous Rikers Island interview, is this: He was guilty of not stopping his homies from coming into that hotel room because his backward definition of manhood said if he did that, it would have meant he liked this woman in some way beyond seeing her as a groupie, and that would have meant the scorn of his homeboys. Why would a man with the brilliance and outward swagger of Tupac Shakur suddenly feel compelled to place the love and support of his male friends above that of the safety and sanity of a woman he had been intimate with? Why did he become so weak and cowardly that even as he knew what he was doing was wrong in his heart and in his gut, he ignored that truth, discarded it like garbage, and plowed ahead? He decided, at that moment, that the path to manhood was in doing what the boys do rather than risking their disapproval to stand up for what he felt was right. Not having a blueprint means improvising at every step, sometimes leaping to brilliance, other times to chaos, other times to gross error. This is really not just about Tupac Shakur. This is about all of us.

And it is really about how we men, we Black men, in the context of hiphop, are so powerless in relation to White America, in relation to White American men (who many of us, dumbly, aspire to emulate), that we, at every turn, oppress women, Black women, by our despicable name-calling (“bitch,” “ho,” “gold digger,” “chickenhead,” etc.), and by our despicable actions (domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault). What we fail to understand is that when we Black men view Black women only as sexual objects, as impediments to our progress, as our enemies, is that we have internalized the very same stereotypes and hatreds the larger White society has had about Black women, dating back to slavery: that Black women are immoral, oversexed, greedy for money and material things, and never to be trusted, while White women, who Black male hiphoppers rarely critique in our music or in our vernacular, are seen as purer, higher, untouchable, which, to some extent, explains the Black male fascination with very light-complexioned Black women, light-skinned Latina women, or Asian women, even, in our music videos. Fully developed and diversified Black womanhood is not acceptable to many of us because it threatens our perceived power. It is much easier to reduce Black women to sexual objects because it allows us to maintain our control, our manhood, if you will. Moreover, the fact that Tupac, although he admitted he was wrong for not stopping his homies from coming into that hotel room, could say to me that the incident convinced him that “there are bitches and there are sisters” says that we Black men in hiphop have fashioned this ridiculous extreme of what Black women are in our minds: either “queens” or “bitches” with no in-between, no depth, no complexities, no realities other than to service Black men in one way or the other: “queens” work for the king and “bitches” work for the “niggas.” What is the difference, friend? Men still rule in both equations. This backward logic explains why Black male leaders rushed to support the eternally troubled Mike Tyson over a decade ago after Desiree Washington charged him with rape (do any of you even care to wonder how Ms. Washington has been doing all these years later after being branded a “traitor” by colored folks?), then, even worse, gave Tyson a rally in Harlem upon his release from prison. Time has proven that Tyson, not Washington, was the one with psychological problems, but, interestingly enough, that chorus of Black male voices is on mute when it comes to encouraging Tyson to seek real help. Or what of the R. Kelly matter, where it has been rumored for years that the R&B crooner has had a thing for female minors, yet we, men and women, still support him…Not only have I heard a number of Black men say that they watched the infamous videotape allegedly showing Kelly engaging in sex with a child, but these Black men saw nothing wrong with it, and some even suggested that “She must have wanted it,” or “Well, she looked grown,” which says, to me, in the main, that we have become so warped by our powerlessness, our self-hatreds, our hatreds of Black women, that we will rationalize any sickening behavior that one from our ranks does because we feel it is our birthright as men to have the sexual favors of women, of girls, even if it means taking it forcibly. And because speaking out against someone from our ranks—a Mike Tyson, a Tupac Shakur, an R. Kelly—portends that we are part of the White establishment attack on Black manhood, that we don’t understand (!) that Black men are an endangered species. Well, does being silent around foul Black male behavior mean it is cool to recklessly disregard the sanity and the lives of Black women because we feel they are not as endangered as we are? And what, dear reader, was my mother if she, with her grade-school education, her poverty, her limited skills, and her battles with my father, the community, and the power structure as symbolized by the welfare and housing agencies, raising me alone, with no help, no love, was not an endangered species?

Black men in the United States need to come to grips with this hardcore reality: we are virtually powerless, landless, and moneyless, while White manhood has always been measured by these acquisitions, from Andrew Carnegie to Ted Turner. So although we live in a patriarchal society, that is, a male-dominated social order, given the definitions of manhood that loom over us, we are paralyzed, quite literally, from figuring out where we fit in, how we obtain power and privilege, and how we can do so without brutalizing and oppressing Black women in the process.  But sadly, most of us are not there, so for Black men, that power and privilege is symbolized by our grabbing of the pistol and the penis, and has been, long before hiphop jumped on the scene with a gangsta lean. If you do not think so, do yourself a favor and check out the old-school blues of Robert Johnson or John Lee Hooker. Or note that Miles Davis had a history of beating Black women and bragged about brutalizing Cicely Tyson in his autobiography. So young Black men of this era have no patent on women-hating behavior. What hiphop has done, thanks in part to the advent of music videos, is accelerate and exacerbate the violence and the woman-hating to the world stage, a stage that now says, without remorse, that we would rather condemn Black women, which is a sucker move, than challenge the true source of our perpetual misery, the White male power structure, as illustrated by, say, racist police officers, politicians, TV show commentators, multinational corporations, government agencies, and elsewhere. And the White male power structure, sitting on the sidelines watching Black men bash Black women ad infinitum, conveniently washes it hands of blood, guilt, and complicity and spitefully declares that all things hiphop is what is morally wrong with America—the sexism, the violence, the materialism, and so on—without ever owning up to the fact that sexism, violence, and materialism have existed, and will continue to exist, in the American matrix long after hiphop fades as an art form….

I’ve thought about these issues a great deal since those sad moments when I was in Las Vegas covering what would be the last days of Tupac Shakur’s tragic story for Rolling Stone. It was otherworldly because up until that week, I had written about Tupac exclusively for Vibe magazine. But because I had been fired four months prior, I was now on assignment for another magazine. No matter; I knew I needed to be in Las Vegas. Why? I am not exactly sure. When I arrived in Vegas, three days before Tupac died, I said to myself that this was not the type of city in which I wanted to die. There are slot machines even at the airport, and you can literally get anything you want on the Strip: sex, drugs, cars, a lawyer, a marriage, or a divorce. It is little wonder Las Vegas is called “Sin City.” As I made my way around town, talking with cabdrivers, hotel maids, construction workers, card table operators, prostitutes, police officers, and others, it was clear that few knew or even cared to know about the life and times of Tupac Shakur.

Some thought he was a gangster. Others thought he was a gang member (some said he was a Blood, others said he was a Crip). Many also said that Tupac’s getting shot in Las Vegas was bringing unnecessary attention to a city already dogged by a seedy image. The more I explored Las Vegas (I couldn’t do much else until the day Tupac actually died because Suge Knight’s security team—or whoever they were—made sure that the media and other unknowns did not come too close to the hospital), the more I thought of Nicholas Cage’s Academy Award-winning role in “Leaving Las Vegas.” Hadn’t Cage’s character, an outcast, come to Las Vegas to die. Hadn’t Cage’s character succumbed to alcohol addiction and taking up with prostitutes? Hadn’t Cage’s character given up on life? How many times, I asked myself, had Tupac Shakur said to me he would not live a long time, that he in fact did not want to live a long time, and that he would probably go down in a hail of bullets? The thought of the fast-moving world of Las Vegas being a burial ground for those who had lived fast lives, like Tupac, unnerved me. Maybe, as many of his fans have suggested, Tupac did see it coming and knew when and where he was going to die. Hadn’t he achieved his very modest goals of “hearing myself on a record and seeing myself in a movie”? What else was there for him to live for if he was, as he said so often, in so much pain? So much pain, he maintained, that only his huge intake of weed allowed him to live as long as he had.

When I listen to some of the comments about Tupac Shakur, specifically, and about young Black men in America’s inner cities, in general, it is clear that many of those commenting are very much out of touch with reality. It is so easy to say, for example, “Well, Tupac had choices” or “Tupac knew what he was getting himself into.” What choices, really, did Tupac have? He was born poor, so he knew he had to survive. While middle-class White and Black children have the option of thinking about what they want to do with their lives, Tupac decided early on that being a rapper was his surest and perhaps only ticket out of the ghetto. And in the insulated world of ghetto culture, your Blackness, your manhood, are narrowly defined by how “real” you keep it, how hard you are, how much you represent the thug life. Move one step away from that and you are considered a sellout. And why would Tupac Shakur—who had been an outcast his entire life, who resented that when he was child his cousins said he was “too pretty”—position himself in any other way except as a “real nigga.” That does not suggest choice; it suggests doing what you have to do to survive in the ghetto world that produced you. Sure, Tupac could have assimilated easily into the realm of Hollywood (he did hang out with the likes of Madonna and Mickey Rourke) but that plastic, middle-class existence meant nothing to him. Nor was it real. What was real were the homies, from South-Central Los Angeles to the South Bronx, whom he felt he had to represent. So when you think of Tupac—the baggy pants with the boxer shorts peeking out, the numerous tattoos, the bald head, the bandana, the pimp limp, the jewelry, the women, the mouth, the attitude—you are essentially getting the average working-class Black male in America today. And last time I checked, there are more of us than the bourgeois variety we are told by some to be like. From the bebop era of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to hiphop, Black men have always rebelled against the customs of the larger society through their art and their lives, through their beings. People like to say hiphop is just so harsh, so foul. Well, as Amiri Baraka once famously put it, you can always tell the station of a people by the music and culture they produce at any given time. To blame hiphop and the Tupac Shakurs of the world for what is wrong with Black youth is to ignore the blood on your own hands. Some of the more wishful among us like to say Tupac Shakur could have been “our next Malcolm.” Again, that kind of statement speaks to our fascination with icons and our propensity for deifying people who breathe and sleep and bleed and defecate just like the rest of us. Moreover, as far as I am concerned, the question is not whether Tupac Shakur would have been the next Malcolm X had he lived, but whether Malcolm Little would have become Malcolm X had he been born today. In other words, there is no organization or movement in place that could reach out to the Tupac Shakurs of America and uplift them the way the Nation of Islam did with Malcolm (those who believe the NOI today is what it was then must be on crack). Tupac, like many of us who are young, Black, and male, was pretty much out there on his own. Who was giving him direction? And who understood fully what he was going through? Not his mother. Not his family. Not his friends. Not his fans. Not his enemies. Not Suge Knight. Perhaps not even Tupac himself. And not his father, whoever that was.

On the evening of Tupac’s death I drove with my journalist friend to the intersection of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, where Tupac had been shot. As my friend called in her story I just stared at that intersection, wondering why there were no witnesses in such a well-lit and heavily traveled area. I called my homegirl Tracy Carness in Los Angeles, and her first words to me, before we could even exchange greetings, were “Kevin, he’s dead. I can’t believe he is dead.” Neither could I. Tupac was, in a phrase, a “bad nigga.” That scared a lot of people, and excited just as many. I was, through the years, somewhere in the middle. I was not scared of Tupac. I was scared for him. But I also loved the fact that he had no problem throwing up his middle finger anywhere and anytime it suited him. As he rapped once, “I was given this world, I didn’t make it.” And as far as Tupac was concerned, this world had been giving him and people who looked like him the finger all along. So Tupac’s life was an exacting sort of revenge, on White people, on snobby Black people, on the rich, on anyone who had no sympathy for the oppressed and voiceless on this planet.

After I spoke with my friend Tracy, I went back to my hotel room, got drunk, poured some liquor on the carpet in Tupac’s memory, and recalled the last time I saw him in person. It was late November 1995. Tupac had been bailed out of an upstate New York prison by Suge Knight (he had been incarcerated for a sexual assault charge stemming from that hotel room encounter with the young woman) and was now back in Los Angeles shooting a video for the first single from his double CD album. The $600,000 “California Love” video was being shot a hundred miles north of Los Angeles at a dry lake bed in the desert. I milled around for a while checking out the imitation “Mad Max” set, then made my way to Tupac’s trailer. I knocked on the door, and someone on the other side pushed it open, releasing a powerful gust of marijuana smoke. And there he was, the big eyes shining brightly, the smile still childlike and broad as an ocean, his exposed muscles—probably because of his eleven-month prison bid—bigger than ever. Clearly this was not the same Tupac who had, only ten months earlier while in jail, told me that he was no longer going to smoke weed, that he was not a gangsta, that “thug life is dead.” Or maybe it was. Whatever the case, from that day in November until his death Tupac became in my mind an exact replica of the character he played in “Juice.” It was shocking to hear his new album, it was shocking to see him in television interviews, and it pissed me off that he helped to escalate the tensions between East Coast and West Coast rappers (born on the East Coast, Tupac had gone back and forth with his sentiments until he signed to Death Row Records in October 1995). For sure, when I asked Tupac what was going to come of the East Coast-West Coast rift, he said, as he was being whisked away to do a television interview, “It’s gonna get deep.” How prophetic were those words, as first Tupac then The Notorious B.I.G. were blown away, both murders still unsolved all these years later. I watched Tupac for the next few hours as he shot scenes and paraded in front of cameras, counting wads of money, as the hulking persona of Suge Knight stood in the background.

A few weeks later I spoke to Tupac for the last time when I conducted a follow-up telephone interview with him. Apparently much had changed in Tupac’s mind since our last interview, and he let it be known how angry he was, it seemed, with everyone. But, he maintained, he could at least trust Suge Knight and the Death Row family because they could protect him from his enemies. I remember hanging up the phone after that interview, on December 2, 1995, and feeling very sick. I know what it is to be angry because I have a very short fuse. And I know what it is to feel paranoid, to believe in your heart that no one is your friend and that everyone is out to get you. But Tupac displayed a side of himself, a darker, more menacing side. I thought, Damn, maybe I never really knew him. I didn’t want to speak to Tupac Shakur anymore. I guess a part of me knew it was only a matter of time before he would get his wish and be gone from us forever. I never stopped following Tupac’s life, and whenever I heard someone mention his name, I listened as carefully as I had done back in 1992. ‘Pac once told me he wanted me to be Alex Haley to his Malcolm X, to be the official biographer of his life. And that is precisely how I felt at times, like the one writer who was attempting to present a broad picture of Tupac Shakur, who was making an effort to understand him because, hell, Tupac was me, and I was him, ghetto bastards from birth, living until it is our turn to die. So, in a way, the “new” Tupac made me feel as if I had lost a friend, and there was nothing I could do about it. He was gone.

I met Tupac’s natural father, Billy Garland, a few weeks after Tupac died. Tupac had been so adamant about not knowing his father that I did not believe that this man was in fact his father until I saw him in person. But the moment I saw him, I knew he was: There was the tall, lean body, the flat-footed walk, the girlish eye-lashes, the long nose, and, yeah, the bushy eyebrows. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about the meeting. While I was glad to meet this man Afeni Shakur had referred to in my first Vibe article on Tupac as “Billy,” I thought of how long it took Billy to reconnect with his son. And that was only after he had seen Tupac in “Juice.” What, I wondered would have been different about Tupac’s life had Billy been there? What would have been the same? Did Billy only become interested in his son once he became famous and, presumably, rich? Did Billy realize Tupac had spent his entire twenty-five years searching for father figures in the form of teachers, street hustlers, fellow rappers like Ice-T and Chuck D., and men as different as Suge Knight and Quincy Jones? I didn’t ask Billy Garland any of these questions but they were definitely on my mind. No matter: I sat and talked with Billy Garland for two or three hours in his Jersey City apartment, about his life, about Tupac’s life, and about his absence from Tupac’s universe. Billy showed me pictures of himself with Tupac, of the letters ‘Pac had written him from prison, of the many cards he had received since Tupac’s untimely death. Tupac had barely known this man, I thought, just as I barely knew my father. Was Billy Garland one of those Black men I had described previously, one of the damaged souls from the civil rights era, an ex-Panther and now a broken-down warrior trying to get a grip on his life via his dead son? Billy even asked me if he should sue Afeni Shakur for half of the Tupac Shakur estate. I was both astounded and appalled. This man had really been nothing more than a drop of sperm, and now he wanted to reap the benefits of the money a dead rapper as iconic as Tupac was sure to bring. But for some reason I was not angry with Billy Garland. A part of me understood exactly where he was coming from because, hell, he is a Black man in America and he has nothing to show for it except a tiny apartment, and a dead, famous son. Billy had had a hard life himself, in the 1970s and 1980s, as he struggled to come of age as Tupac was coming of age. There had been no blueprint for Billy Garland, just as there had been no blueprint for Tupac Shakur, or for me, for that matter. We were-are—simply thrown out there and told to swim, although most of us do not know how and are too terrified to learn.

But it is something to see older Black men as I do, as a man myself. I will be completely candid here and say that I have carried around a great deal of resentment toward older Black men since my father disowned me when I was eight years old. Indeed, I have had little tolerance, little respect, and and very little interest in what most of them have to say for themselves. It is the worst form of cowardice to bring a child into the world and then abandon that child either because you cannot cope or because you and the child’s mother are not able to get along. How many Black boys and Black girls have had their emotional beings decimated by that father void? Certainly Tupac, and certainly me.

Perhaps it is for this reason that I cannot readily recall all that Billy Garland said to me on that day after he asked my advice about suing Afeni Shakur. I was disgusted and saw in him my father and my grandfather and my uncle, my mother’s only brother, and undeniably I saw myself and what I could possibly become. The predictability horrified me, because I could hear the echoes of my mother’s caveat from my childhood: Don’t be like your father. But what did my mother mean, precisely? If not like him, then like whom? In seeking to raid Tupac’s grave for dollars, Billy Garland showing the worst attributes of Black manhood, but also of White manhood, of American manhood. So what would the alernative be? How does one break the vicious cycle, begun on the plantations, of Black man as stud, as Black male body forced to tend someone else’s land and property, as Black man torn away from his family, moved to and fro, of Black man being beaten down to the point that his woman and his children no longer know his name. Again, what of slavery, which lasted 246 years and lingers still in the collective bosom of Black men in America, particularly since we were slaves a hundred years longer than we have been free? So how could I really be mad at Billy Garland—or my father, for that matter—anymore? Garland, via Tupac’s death, was getting more attention than he had ever gotten in his entire rotten life and he needed Tupac’s death to validate his existence. How twisted a concept! But it is true. And what of my father, that no-good do-for-nothing, as my mother often referred to him? I may never see the man again in my lifetime, don’t care to, really, but I know wherever he is, he is not free. He is wounded; he is, like an older Black men and like a lot of younger Black men, in a state of arrested development, suspended above the fiery coals of his unstable journey here in America. But, with all of my being, I have to muster the nerve to forgive him, my father, for impregnating my mother, for not being there at the hospital when I was born, for not marrying my mother and leaving her to the whims of the welfare agency, for only showing up sporadically the first eight years of my life, for declaring to my mother on that damp, rainy day that she had lied to him, that I was not his child, that he would not give her a “near-nickel” for me ever again—and he has not. Oh, how I suffered, as Tupac suffered, without a male figure in my life, someone whose skin felt like mine, whose blood beat like mine, whose walk pounded the earth for answers, like mine. But alas, poor Tupac, it was not meant to be, and you are dead, and I am here, and we both have fathers, yet we both are also fatherless. The only thing I can say at this moment in my life journey—because, unlike Tupac, I did get to make it past twenty-five, into my thirties—is that I have to stay alive any way I can, and I have to be my own father now.

Kevin Powell is the author of 7 books, including his new essay collection, Someday We’ll All Be Free, which tackles the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and September 11th, as well as notions of freedom, democracy, and justice in the Bush era. He can be reached at kepo1@aol.com .

 EUR sent this out today to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Tupac’s death. Powell‘s new book, mentioned in the tagline, is out now.

What Is A Man? (Alas, Poor Tupac)
By Kevin Powell     

The following piece is taken from Kevin Powell’s 2003 best-selling essay collection, Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? Manhood, Race, and Power in America. Powell interviewed Tupac Shakur on several occasions while he was a senior writer at Vibe magazine, including what are widely considered the definitive articles and profiles on the late Tupac Shakur. To mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Shakur on September 13, 1996, Powell is reprinting the following excerpt exclusively with EUR.

     I’ve thought about these issues a great deal since those sad moments when I was in Las Vegas covering what would be the last days of Tupac Shakur’s tragic story for Rolling Stone.

     It was otherworldly because up until that week, I had written about Tupac exclusively for Vibe magazine. But because I had been fired four months prior, I was now on assignment for another magazine. No matter; I knew I needed to be in Las Vegas. Why? I am not exactly sure.

     When I arrived in Vegas, three days before Tupac died, I said to myself that this was not the type of city in which I wanted to die. There are slot machines even at the airport, and you can literally get anything you want on the Strip: sex, drugs, cars, a lawyer, a marriage, or a divorce. It is little wonder Las Vegas is called “Sin City.” As I made my way around town, talking with cabdrivers, hotel maids, construction workers, card table operators, prostitutes, police officers, and others, it was clear that few knew or even cared to know about the life and times of Tupac Shakur.

     Some thought he was a gangster. Others thought he was a gang member (some said he was a Blood, others said he was a Crip). Many also said that Tupac’s getting shot in Las Vegas was bringing unnecessary attention to a city already dogged by a seedy image.

     The more I explored Las Vegas (I couldn’t do much else until the day Tupac actually died because Suge Knight’s security team-or whoever they were-made sure that the media and other unknowns did not come too close to the hospital), the more I thought of Nicholas Cage’s Academy Award-winning role in “Leaving Las Vegas.” Hadn’t Cage’s character, an outcast, come to Las Vegas to die. Hadn’t Cage’s character succumbed to alcohol addiction and taking up with prostitutes? Hadn’t Cage’s character given up on life? How many times, I asked myself, had Tupac Shakur said to me he would not live a long time, that he in fact did not want to live a long time, and that he would probably go down in a hail of bullets? The thought of the fast-moving world of Las Vegas being a burial ground for those who had lived fast lives, like Tupac, unnerved me. Maybe, as many of his fans have suggested, Tupac did see it coming and knew when and where he was going to die. Hadn’t he achieved his very modest goals of “hearing myself on a record and seeing myself in a movie”? What else was there for him to live for if he was, as he said so often, in so much pain? So much pain, he maintained, that only his huge intake of weed allowed him to live as long as he had.

     When I listen to some of the comments about Tupac Shakur, specifically, and about young Black men in America’s inner cities, in general, it is clear that many of those commenting are very much out of touch with reality. It is so easy to say, for example, “Well, Tupac had choices” or “Tupac new what he was getting himself into.” What choices, really, did Tupac have? He was born poor, so he knew he had to survive. While middle-class White and Black children have the option of thinking about what they want to do with their lives, Tupac decided early on that being a rapper was his surest and perhaps only ticket out of the ghetto. And in the insulated world of ghetto culture, your Blackness, your manhood, are narrowly defined by how “real” you keep it, how hard you are, how much you represent the thug life. Move one step away from that and you are considered a sellout. And why would Tupac Shakur—who had been an outcast his entire life, who resented that when he was child his cousins said he was “too pretty”—position himself in any other way except as a “real nigga.” That does not suggest choice; it suggests doing what you have to do to survive in the ghetto world that produced you. Sure, Tupac could have assimilated easily into the realm of Hollywood (he did hang out with the likes of Madonna and Mickey Rourke) but that plastic, middle-class existence meant nothing to him. Nor was it real. What was real were the homies, from South-Central Los Angeles to the South Bronx, whom he felt he had to represent. So when you think of Tupac—the baggy pants with the boxer shorts peeking out, the numerous tattoos, the bald head, the bandana, the pimp limp, the jewelry, the women, the mouth, the attitude—you are essentially getting the average working-class Black male in America today. And last time I checked, there are more of us than the bourgeois variety we are told by some to be like. From the bebop era of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to hiphop, Black men have always rebelled against the customs of the larger society through their art and their lives, through their beings. People like to say hiphop is just so harsh, so foul. Well, as Amiri Baraka once famously put it, you can always tell the station of a people by the music and culture they produce at any given time. To blame hiphop and the Tupac Shakurs of the world for what is wrong with Black youth is to ignore the blood on your own hands. Some of the more wishful among us like to say Tupac Shakur could have been “our next Malcolm.” Again, that kind of statement speaks to our fascination with icons and our propensity for deifying people who breathe and sleep and bleed and defecate just like the rest of us. Moreover, as far as I am concerned, the question is not whether Tupac Shakur would have been the next Malcolm X had he lived, but whether Malcolm Little would have become Malcolm X had he been born today. In other words, there is no organization or movement in place that could reach out to the Tupac Shakurs of America and uplift them the way the Nation of Islam did with Malcolm (those who believe the NOI today is what it was then must be on crack). Tupac, like many of us who are young, Black, and male, was pretty much out there on his own. Who was giving him direction? And who understood fully what he was going through? Not his mother. Not his family. Not his friends. Not his fans. Not his enemies. Not Suge Knight. Perhaps not even Tupac himself. And not his father, whoever that was.

     On the evening of Tupac’s death I drove with my journalist friend to the intersection of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, where Tupac had been shot. As my friend called in her story I just stared at that intersection, wondering why there were no witnesses in such a well-lit and heavily traveled area. I called my homegirl Tracy Carness in Los Angeles, and her first words to me, before we could even exchange greetings, were “Kevin, he’s dead. I can’t believe he is dead.” Neither could I. Tupac was, in a phrase, a “bad nigga.” That scared a lot of people, and excited just as many. I was, through the years, somewhere in the middle. I was not scared of Tupac. I was scared for him. But I also loved the fact that he had no problem throwing up his middle finger anywhere and anytime it suited him. As he rapped once, “I was given this world, I didn’t make it.” And as far as Tupac was concerned, this world had been giving him and people who looked like him the finger all along. So Tupac’s life was an exacting sort of revenge, on White people, on snobby Black people, on the rich, on anyone who had no sympathy for the oppressed and voiceless on this planet.

     After I spoke with my friend Tracy, I went back to my hotel room, got drunk, poured some liquor on the carpet in Tupac’s memory, and recalled the last time I saw him in person. It was late November 1995. Tuipac had been bailed out of an upstate New York prison by Suge Knight (he had been incarcerated for a sexual assault charge stemming from that hotel room encounter with the young woman) and was now back in Los Angeles shooting a video for the first single from his double CD album. The $600,000 “California Love” video was being shot a hundred miles north of Los Angeles at a dry lake bed in the desert. I milled around for a while checking out the imitation “Mad Max” set, then made my way to Tupac’s trailer. I knocked on the door, and someone on the other side pushed it open, releasing a powerful gust of marijuana smoke. And there he was, the big eyes shining brightly, the smile still childlike and broad as an ocean, his exposed muscles-probably because of his eleven-month prison bid-bigger than ever. Clearly this was not the same Tupac who had, only ten months earlier while in jail, told me that he was no longer going to smoke weed, that he was not a gangsta, that “thug life is dead.” Or maybe it was. Whatever the case, from that day in November until his death Tupac became in my mind an exact replica of the character he played in “Juice.” It was shocking to hear his new album, it was shocking to see him in television interviews, and it pissed me off that he helped to escalate the tensions between East Coast and West Coast rappers (born on the East Coast, Tupac had gone back and forth with his sentiments until he signed to Death Row Records in October 1995). For sure, when I asked Tupac what was going to come of the East Coast-West Coast rift, he said, as he was being whisked away to do a television interview, “It’s gonna get deep.” How prophetic were those words, as first Tupac then The Notorious B.I.G. were blown away, both murders still unsolved all these years later. I watched Tupac for the next few hours as he shot scenes and paraded in front of cameras, counting wads of money, as the hulking persona of Suge Knight stood in the background.

     A few weeks later I spoke to Tupac for the last time when I conducted a follow-up telephone interview with him. Apparently much had changed in Tupac’s mind since our last interview, and he let it be known how angry he was, it seemed, with everyone. But, he maintained, he could at least trust Suge Knight and the Death Row family because they could protect him from his enemies. I remember hanging up the phone after that interview, on December 2, 1995, and feeling very sick. I know what it is to be angry because I have a very short fuse. And I know what it is to feel paranoid, to believe in your heart that no one is your friend and that everyone is out to get you. But Tupac displayed a side of himself, a darker, more menacing side. I thought, Damn, maybe I never really knew him. I didn’t want to speak to Tupac Shakur anymore. I guess a part of me knew it was only a matter of time before he would get his wish and be gone from us forever. I never stopped following Tupac’s life, and whenever I heard someone mention his name, I listened as carefully as I had done back in 1992. ‘Pac once told me he wanted me to be Alex Haley to his Malcolm X, to be the official biographer of his life. And that is precisely how I felt at times, like the one writer who was attempting to present a broad picture of Tupac Shakur, who was making an effort to understand him because, hell, Tupac was me, and I was him, ghetto bastards from birth, living until it is our turn to die. So, in a way, the “new” Tupac made me feel as if I had lost a friend, and there was nothing I could do about it. He was gone.

     I met Tupac’s natural father, Billy Garland, a few weeks after Tupac died. Tupac had been so adamant about not knowing his father that I did not believe that this man was in fact his father until I saw him in person. But the moment I saw him, I knew he was: There was the tall, lean body, the flat-footed walk, the girlish eye-lashes, the long nose, and, yeah, the bushy eyebrows. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about the meeting. While I was glad to meet this man Afeni Shakur had referred to in my first Vibe article on Tupac as “Billy,” I thought of how long it took Billy to reconnect with his son. And that was only after he had seen Tupac in Juice. What, I wondered would have been different about Tupac’s life had Billy been there? What would have been the same? Did Billy only become interested in his son once he became famous and, presumably, rich? Did Billy realize Tupac had spent his entire twenty-five years searching for father figures in the form of teachers, street hustlers, fellow rappers like Ice-T and Chuck D., and men as different as Suge Knight and Quincy Jones? I didn’t ask Billy Garland any of these questions but they were definitely on my mind. No matter: I sat and talked with Billy Garland for two or three hours in his Jersey City apartment, about his life, about Tupac’s life, and about his absence from Tupac’s universe. Billy showed me pictures of himself with Tupac, of the letters ‘Pac had written him from prison, of the many cards he had received since Tupac’s untimely death. Tupac had barely known this man, I thought, just as I barely knew my father. Was Billy Garland one of those Black men I had described previously, one of the damaged souls from the civil rights era, an ex-Panther and now a broken-down warrior trying to get a grip on his life via his dead son? Billy even asked me if he should sue Afeni Shakur for half of the Tupac Shakur estate. I was both astounded and appalled. This man had really been nothing more than a drop of sperm, and now he wanted to reap the benefits of the money a dead rapper as iconic as Tupac was sure to bring. But for some reason I was not angry with Billy Garland. A part of me understood exactly where he was coming from because, hell, he is a Black man in America and he has nothing to show for it except a tiny apartment, and a dead, famous son. Billy had had a hard life himself, in the 1970s and 1980s, as he struggled to come of age as Tupac was coming of age. There had been no blueprint for Billy Garland, just as there had been no blueprint for Tupac Shakur, or for me, for that matter. We were-are-simply thrown out there and told to swim, although most of us do not know how and are too terrified to learn.

     But it is something to see older Black men as I do, as a man myself. I will be completely candid here and say that I have carried around a great deal of resentment toward older Black men since my father disowned me when I was eight years old. Indeed, I have had little tolerance, little respect, and and very little interest in what most of them have to say for themselves. It is the worst form of cowardice to bring a child into the world and then abandon that child either because you cannot cope or because you and the child’s mother are not able to get along. How many Black boys and Black girls have had their emotional beings decimated by that father void? Certainly Tupac, and certainly me. 

Perhaps it is for this reason that I cannot readily recall all that Billy Garland said to me on that day after he asked my advice about suing Afeni Shakur. I was disgusted and saw in him my father and my grandfather and my uncle, my mother’s only brother, and undeniably I saw myself and what I could possibly become. The predictability horrified me, because I could hear the echoes of my mother’s caveat from my childhood: Don’t be like your father. But what did my mother mean, precisely? If not like him, then like whom? In seeking to raid Tupac’s grave for dollars, Billy Garland showing the worst attributes of Black manhood, but also of White manhood, of American manhood. So what would the alernative be? How does one break the vicious cycle, begun on the plantations, of Black man as stud, as Black male body forced to tend someone else’s land and property, as Black man torn away from his family, moved to and fro, of Black man being beaten down to the point that his woman and his children no longer know his name. Again, what of slavery, which lasted 246 years and lingers still in the collective bosom of Black men in America, particularly since we were slaves a hundred years longer than we have been free? So how could I really be mad at Billy Garland-or my father, for that matter-anymore? Garland, via Tupac’s death, was getting more attention than he had ever gotten in his entire rotten life and he needed Tupac’s death to validate his existence. How twisted a concept! But it is true. And what of my father, that no-good do-for-nothing, as my mother often referred to him? I may never see the man again in my lifetime, don’t care to, really, but I know wherever he is, he is not free. He is wounded; he is, like an older Black men and like a lot of younger Black men, in a state of arrested development, suspended above the fiery coals of his unstable journey here in America. But, with all of my being, I have to muster the nerve to forgive him, my father, for impregnating my mother, for not being there at the hospital when I was born, for not marrying my mother and leaving her to the whims of the welfare agency, for only showing up sporadically the first eight years of my life, for declaring to my mother on that damp, rainy day that she had lied to him, that I was not his child, that he would not give her a “near-nickel” for me ever again-and he has not. Oh, how I suffered, as Tupac suffered, without a male figure in my life, someone whose skin felt like mine, whose blood beat like mine, whose walk pounded the earth for answers, like mine. But alas, poor Tupac, it was not meant to be, and you are dead, and I am here, and we both have fathers, yet we both are also fatherless. The only thing I can say at this moment in my life journey—because, unlike Tupac, I did get to make it past twenty-five, into my thirties—is that I have to stay alive any way I can, and I have to be my own father now.

Kevin Powell is the author of 7 books, including his new essay collection, Someday We’ll All Be Free, which tackles the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and September 11th, as well as notions of freedom, democracy, and justice in the Bush era. He can be reached at kepo1@aol.com .