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By Root 641 0

“a complex and sometimes contradictory figure,” as Jon Pereles, a music critic for the New York Times, wrote in an obituary. It was a key point missed by much of the media, which ran photos of the huge tattoo across Shakur’s belly—“THUG LIFE”—but failed to pass along what he said it stood for: “The Hate You Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone.” And while many mentioned that he had attended the High School of Performing Arts in Baltimore, few acknowledged the lasting impact of that education. “It influences all my work. I really like stuff like ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Gospel at Colonus,’” Shakur told a Los Angeles Times interviewer in 1995. He described himself as “the kind of guy who is moved by a song like Don McLean’s ’Vincent,’ that one about Van Gogh. The lyric on that song is so touching. That’s how I want to make my songs feel.”44

After Tupac Shakur’s death a writer in the Washington Post characterized him as “stupid” and “misguided” and accused him of having “committed the unpardonable sin of using his immense poetic talents to degrade and debase the very people who needed his positive words most—his fans.” To judge by their loving tributes to him in calls to radio stations, prayer vigils, and murals that appeared on walls in inner cities following his death, many of those fans apparently held a different view. Ernest Hardy of the L.A. Weekly, an alternative paper, was probably closer to the mark when he wrote of Shakur: “What made him important and forged a bond with so many of his young black (especially black male) fans was that he was a signifier trying to figure out what he signified. He knew he lived in a society that still didn’t view him as human, that projected its worst fears onto him; he had to decide whether to battle that or to embrace it.”45

Readers of the music magazine Vibe had seen Shakur himself describe this conflict in an interview not long before his death. “What are you at war with?” the interviewer asked. “Different things at different times,” Shakur replied. “My own heart sometimes. There’s two niggas inside me. One wants to live in peace, and the other won’t die unless he’s free.”46

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. The opening lines from Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, still ring true nearly half a century after its publication. “I am an invisible man,” Ellison wrote. “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”47

6

“SMACK IS BACK”

When Presidents and the Press Collude, the Scares Never Stop

Many scares, like Hollywood stars, have their heyday and then fade from sight, more or less permanently. Witness panics over razor blades in Halloween apples, abortion as a cause of cancer, or children dumping their elderly parents at racetracks. Other fears have more staying power, as the discussion of scares about black men suggests.

Another perennial scare owes its long run to powerful sponsorship. For three decades U.S. presidents and media organizations have worked in unison to promote fears of drug abuse. Unlike almost every other hazard, illicit drugs have no interest group to defend them. So they are safe fodder for winning elections and ratings. 1

Drug abuse is a serious problem that deserves serious public attention. But sensationalism rather than rationality has guided the national conversation. Misinformed about who uses drugs, which drugs people abuse, and with what results, we waste enormous sums of money and fail to address other social and personal problems effectively. Federal drug enforcement, a $6 million expense in the 1960s, passed the $1 billion mark in the mid-1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and more than $17 billion during Bill Clinton’s. Throughout the 1980s