Bigger Thomas, of Native Son and Tupac Shakur

"Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must posses and understand it."

-- Richard Wright

In 1996, famed rapper and entertainer Tupac Shakur[1] was gunned down in Las Vegas. Journalistic sentiment at the time suggested he deserved the brutal death. The New York Times headline, "Rap Performer Who Personified Violence, Dies," suggested Shakur, who was twenty five when he died, deserved his untimely death. - (Pareles, 1996) A product of a fatherless home, raised poor in the ghettos of San Francisco, Shakur, notes Ernest Harding of the L.A. Weekly, "lived in a society that still didn't view him a[s] human, that projected his worst fears onto him; [so] he had to decide whether to battle that or embrace it." (Hardy, 1996) As these fears forced Shakur into a corner, Shakur, in the music magazine Vibe, alludes to his own interior battle noting "there's two nigga's inside me," adding "one wants to live in peace, and the other won't die unless he's free." (All Eyes on Him, 1996) While many of his lyrics sensationalized gang violence and ghetto politics, dramatizing the murder of fellow African Americans and, especially, police officers, he also labored over trying to come to grips with African American self-realization, breaking free from imposed societal chains. Unfortunately, as Barry Glassner muses in his book The Culture of Fear (1999), �it seems to me at once sad, inexcusable, and entirely symptomatic of the culture of fear that the only version of Tupac Shakur many Americans knew was a frightening and unidimensional caricature.� (127) In o...

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...ttman, S. (2001). What Bigger Killed For: Rereading Violence Against Women in Native Son. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43.2 , 169-193.

Hardy, E. (1996, September 20). Do Thug Niggaz Go to Heaven? L.A. Weekly , p. 51.

Lena, J. C. (2006). Social Context and Musical Content of Rap Music, 1979-1995. Social Forces 85.1 , 479-495.

Pareles, J. (1996, September 12). Tupac Shakur, 25, Rap Performer Who Personified Violence, Dies. New York Times , pp. A1, 34.

Saddik, A. J. (2003). Rap's Unruly Body: The Postmodern Performance of Black Male Identity On the American Stage.

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Shakur, Tupac. "Words of Wisdom, Crooked Ass Nigga." 2pacalypse Now. 1991.

Shakur, Tupac. "God Bless the Dead." Greatest Hits. 1998.

Wright, R. (1940 Reissued in Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 2005). Native Son. New York: HarperCollins.