Review: ‘Words for My Comrades' defines the complex politics of rapper Tupac Shakur

San Francisco Chronicle​

09-05-2025

It's possible rapper Tupac Shakur first formulated his distaste for police brutality while still inside the womb.
That's because his mother, Black Panther member Afeni Shakur, was heavily pregnant with him when she served as her own defense in New York City's infamous Panther 21 trial. How that baby would come to be revered as a titan of West Coast hip-hop — as well as a modern figurehead for revolution — serves as the premise for author Dean Van Nguyen's insightful new work examining Tupac Shakur's politics and socioeconomic experiences.
In 'Words for My Comrades: The Political History of Tupac Shakur,' Van Nguyen contextualizes the hallowed lyrics of Shakur's music by contrasting a personal biography of the rapper with relevant history lessons on, among others, the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. Raised in poverty and educated by a mother who regularly risked everything in support of her beliefs, Shakur's upbringing somehow managed to place him in the epicenter of the burgeoning hip-hop movement. He died in 1996 at age 25.
His life was never easy, but Shakur's presence in New York City, then the Bay Area via Marin City, marked fateful chapters in his story. Enlightening scenes include a spotlight on Shakur's brief time as a student at San Rafael's Tamalpais High School, with teacher Barbara Owens recalling the budding actor's singular talent for bringing Shakespeare to life. 'You will never, in your lifetime, hear 'Othello' as well as you just heard it now,' she recalls telling her classroom after one such memorable performance.
It can be slightly difficult to follow the threads of Van Nguyen's narrative as it frequently jumps from the biographical to the historical to explain how figures like Black Panther cofounder Bobby Seale and moments like the 1966 Hunter's Point uprising in San Francisco ultimately informed Shakur's work.
Other elements are presented with more ambiguity. Van Nguyen spends little time covering the more unsavory elements of Tupac's timeline, including his involvement in the accidental shooting death of a six-year-old boy in Marin City in 1992 and the sexual assault charges he faced in 1995. Both earn brief mentions in the text, but Van Nguyen fails to elucidate on whether either incident made a lasting impact on Shakur or his music.
Following his Bay Area years, he ultimately anchored in Los Angeles and launched his career as a dual-threat rapper and actor. The fiery notions contained in his verses — in which Shakur forcefully argued against capitalism, police brutality and imperialism — first took flame in the form of real-life events. At one point, Van Nguyen recalls how the rapper abruptly left the set of John Singleton's film 'Poetic Justice' in 1992 following the announcement of a 'not guilty' verdict in the trial of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King.
'Singleton later heard stories of Tupac driving down Wilshire Boulevard shooting out windows,' Van Nguyen writes.
Shakur also saw firsthand the ravages inflicted by crack cocaine when his mother temporarily succumbed to the drug, forcing the 19-year-old to fully take control of his own life. Ultimately, Afeni would reconnect with her Black Panther family in New York and overcome her addiction, once again proving her uncanny capacity for resilience, but the chapter left lasting scars on the younger Shakur.
It was all these elements — including extreme poverty — coupled with an inextinguishable pride that led her son to become a deity in the world of rap as well as a lasting symbol of resistance.
From referencing Malcolm X's 'The Ballot or the Bullet' speech in his 1993 song 'Holla If Ya Hear Me' to the roles Tupac's music has continued to play in modern protests, like those waged in honor of George Floyd in 2020, it's obvious categorizing his contributions solely under the guise of music is, to Van Nguyen, a failure to recognize all that the late rapper gave and continues to give us.
Once again, it all begins with the rapper's birth, when he was temporarily named Lesane Parish Crooks as a means of avoiding detection from government agencies eager to track the offspring of a high-ranking Black Panther member. By his first birthday, his title had been rightfully restored, with Afeni naming her son in honor of Tupac Amaru II, an Andean rebel who died fighting against Spanish colonial rule.
'The name proved to be a chilling prophecy that came to be,' Van Nguyen writes, 'but as Afeni explained, 'I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, Indigenous people in the world. I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood.''