The gang Tupac Shakur considered to be the biggest on Earth
By the time he was murdered, Tupac Shakur seemed, from the outside at least, to have fully embraced the gangsta rap lifestyle. But was that really the case? Pac was a fiercely intelligent, complicated person, and, while he was full of contradictions, his ideas of what constituted genuine gangsterism were complex and deeply thoughtful. His stated understanding of the world’s biggest gang illustrates it.
Tupac was a political radical. His family was made up of Black revolutionaries, including his very own mother, Afeni, a Black Panther who was arrested and charged with conspiring to blow up landmarks around New York before Pac was born. She represented herself in court, and, along with 20 of her comrades also standing trial, she was acquitted in May 1971. The following month her son was born.
The baby boy was initially named Lesane Parish Crook, but, after a few days, Afeni had a change of heart. She called the boy Tupac instead, naming him after Tupac Amaru II, an indigenous Peruvian leader who, during the 18th century, led a revolt against colonising Spanish forces. “I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood,” Afeni later explained of her decision. “I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world.”
A militant spirit surrounded Tupac growing up. He idolised Malcolm X and he was a teenage member of the Young Communist League. When he started making music, he poured his outlook into his lyrics, as, for example, in the song ‘Words of Wisdom,’ which featured on his debut album 2Pacalypse: “No Malcolm X in my history text, why’s that? / ’Cause he tried to educate and liberate all Blacks / Why is Martin Luther King in my book each week? / He told Blacks, if they get smacked, turn the other cheek.”
Obviously as Tupac became more famous, and particularly as the industry feud between the East and West Coasts heated up, his life changed drastically. Publicly he came to adopt more of a gangsta persona, but what he actually meant by that, possibly, isn’t as simple as it may seem.
In an interview from 1995, Pac laid out his thoughts on what gangs actually are. “I think this country was built on gangs, you know,” he said. “I think this country still is run on gangs: Republicans, Democrats, the police department, the FBI, the CIA—those are gangs! The correctional officers; I had a correctional officer tell me straight up ‘We’re the biggest gang in New York State.’ Straight up, you know what I mean? So, this whole country was built on gangs.”
Elaborating, Tupac highlighted just how violent these powerful groups can be, citing the US’s persistent history of going to war in foreign countries. “You know what gang violence is, mostly?” he said. “And people don’t want you to hear this. Somebody shoots your family member, so of course, you retaliate. Same thing the US does, except nobody shot their family members. Somebody bombs a school and all these people get killed, so the United States be like ‘Oooh, that’s messed up, we gotta go show them who’s the real killer.’ That’s the same mentality these gangsters get… America’s the biggest gang in the world.”
But, from Pac’s perspective, if the American state and its institutions of violence constituted gangs, so, too, could ordinary people come together to form “gangs” of their own to resist. “I think gangs can be positive,” he said. “It just has to be organised and has to steer away from being self-destructive to being self-productive… We just have to not be so self-destructive about it. Organise.”
It’s worth reflecting on Pac’s words here, because his legacy has long been a matter of debate. His politics were not entirely coherent all the time, but nor are anybody’s. Clearly he had a radical critique of American power, and there is a read of his own thug lifestyle that suggests he was responding to that power. He was pushing back against what he understood to be the world’s biggest gang.