Review of Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur by Dean Van Nguyen (Doubleday, 2025).
Who was Tupac Shakur? Depending on who you ask, you’ll get a plethora of responses. He was hip-hop’s greatest icon. He was a violent thug who was convicted of sexual abuse. He was the voice of the oppressed. He was a radical political figure who channeled his own experiences to call out a racist, imperialist government.
Or, perhaps, he was all of these things at once. No matter which answer you get, though, what remains undisputed among those who have grown up with the image of Tupac is that his life unfolded as a revolutionary.
What does that mean, though? You may have come across a social media post or two about Tupac, declaring that his mother, Afeni Shakur, was a prominent member of the Black Panther Party who was involved in the Panther 21 trial. Or that former Panther and Black Liberation Army militant Assata Shakur, who passed away recently, was his godmother. Yet it rarely ever goes beyond that.
That’s a shame, because all the different facets of Tupac’s story — the circumstances under which he was conceived, the family and society into which he was born, the experiences he had in his formative years, and his associations after he found fame — are rooted in the same revolutionary spirit. That spirit played an indispensable role in the enduring impact of this larger-than-life figure on hip-hop, contemporary pop culture, and even revolutionary protest around the world.
This was a vacuum that needed to be filled, which is why music journalist and writer Dean Van Nguyen committed himself to crafting an all-encompassing account of the political history of Tupac Shakur. As he explains:
Too often the analysis of his revolutionary roots has amounted to no more than “Tupac was of Black Panther parentage, ergo, he had the spirit of the Panthers.” I had to show the audience what that exactly meant, who the Panthers were, and how that spirit…
Auteur: Hamza Shehryar
