Now, he is a hero and a martyr, his deeds hardly less offensive than as those committed against him, or us for that matter. And so the reasoning goes. Like Nat Turner, Tupac Shakur was often accused of prophesy, of being a fanatic, of being smart beyond anybody's guess-ing. He once claimed, as Turner did, that God had chosen and directed him to do great things. Likewise, Tupac was accused of embodying a cliched truth.
Violence begets violence, real or imagined.
And now, like Nat Turner, Tupac Shakur is dead. Now maybe the similarities between Tupac and Turner end there. Each one was looking out on a future that seemed to hold very little promise for the majority of black people in America, and each one was powerless to do much about it. And onto both their backs we have hoisted more responsibility than any of us could surely bear. And it could be that our ideas about slavery and our ideas about contemporary Compton have more in common than we like to admit.