In an America drowning in silence and hypocrisy, Tupac’s rage and tenderness offer a map for truth-telling.

Tupac Amaru Shakur knew hypocrisy in America before most of us had the language to describe it. He could see through the official stories, the polished press conferences, the moral posturing, and the selective outrage, and put the raw truth in a verse you could not ignore. He saw a nation that always had money for war but never enough to feed the poor. He saw politicians criminalize his community while quietly excusing the same violence, theft, and corruption in their own ranks. He named those double standards out loud, in music, in interviews, and in poetry that still circulates decades later.

When I scroll through today’s headlines, it feels like he is still talking to us. Another white man radicalized by grievance and conspiracy theories takes a gun into a school, church, or grocery store. The media frames him as troubled, misunderstood, or a lone wolf. Conservative Christians who preach law and order on Sunday mornings vanish into silence when the shooter looks like their sons and neighbors. Politicians offer thoughts and prayers as if that can bury the truth along with the dead. The cycle repeats so often it risks becoming background noise. That is the danger. Violence is becoming ordinary, even invisible. And the epidemic still goes unnamed.

Tupac would not let that slide. He never did. He told us clearly that the system did not care about our lives. He was not simply being provocative. He was testifying to a lived reality where some lives are valued and others are disposable. He named the selective compassion of a country that sends flowers to one community while sending police tanks to another. He held up a mirror, and the reflection was ugly. It still is.

But Tupac’s genius was not just his anger. It was the way he braided anger with tenderness. He had songs that would make you want to march in the streets and others that could make you cry in the quiet of your room. He demanded that we see Black communities not simply as statistics or problems but as human beings full of love, contradiction, and beauty. That duality, rage and softness, is why he still speaks to us. He refused to let America flatten us into stereotypes. He insisted we were whole.

That balance of kindness and rage is exactly what he discussed in his 1991 interview, the one revisited recently on the Throw It Out podcast. Tupac said that kindness without force behind it gets trampled. Rage, when it is channeled, is what keeps kindness alive in a system that does not want to hear it. That lesson resonates now. When politicians, preachers, and pundits dismiss pleas for justice, it is rage that forces them to pay attention. Rage is not the opposite of kindness. It is the shield that protects it.

So when I ask, what would Tupac do, I do not mean it lightly. In today’s America he would not let the media sanitize mass shootings by white men. He would not let Christian Nationalists pretend that blessing assault weapons in pews is godly while staying quiet when those same communities are the sources of mass slaughter. He would not allow leaders to disguise greed as patriotism, corruption as strength, or silence as morality. He would say it plain. He would call it what it is. And he would make sure we could not look away.

The passing of Assata Shakur, Tupac’s godmother and a living symbol of resistance, gives this question even more weight. Assata lived in exile because the United States could not tolerate her existence as a free, outspoken Black woman aligned with liberation. Whether you agree with every detail of her story or not, her life stood as proof of what happens when America confronts someone who refuses to bow. Her survival was resistance. To invoke Tupac in the week of her passing is to acknowledge that rage, clarity, and survival are not new tools. They are inheritance. And now that inheritance sits with us.

There is another thread we must name. In recent months a strain of politics has shifted toward preparing the nation for internal conflict rather than preventing harm. Critics across the spectrum note that leaders who traffic in constant threat building and enemy creation normalize the idea of treating political opponents not as fellow citizens but as existential dangers. When public figures suggest that elections or civic processes are meaningless under certain conditions, or when they praise the suspension of rights in the name of security, those ideas do not stay abstract. They land in the rhetoric of their supporters. When an international leader mentions suspending elections amid war, that detail can be misread as a model. After hearing such comments, some political actors in the United States have amplified narratives that paint Democrats, progressive organizers, dissenting journalists, and whole cities as security threats that must be constrained. This is not merely rhetorical flourish. It is a strategy of delegitimization. It reframes dissent as treason and democracy as risk.

If you listen closely, the language shifts. A protest becomes a riot. A policy demand becomes a threat to national security. A community defense initiative becomes an insurgency. Once that frame takes hold, it is a small step to arguing that civil liberties can be suspended for public safety. That is the danger. When leaders cast opponents as enemies rather than citizens, the moral psychology changes. People who might never have considered violence can be nudged into seeing force as justified against those now dehumanized by rhetoric. Tupac understood this. He knew how language prepares the ground for violence. He knew how easy it is for decent people to be persuaded that the other side is less than human.

Tupac would name the pattern, connect it to policy and profit, and refuse to let us shrug. He would point out that when money flows into militarized police, prisons, and private armies while schools and housing go unfunded, the state is choosing who matters. He would call out the theater of threats that makes enemies out of neighbors and justify the erosion of rights under the banner of safety. He would demand that we see the moral stakes clearly and contest the language of emergency the moment it appears.

Tupac would not only analyze. He would push us to act. He would ask us to notice the signals in our own communities, the sermons that slide into grievance, the local anchors that repeat national fear mongering, the school board members who speak in code about threats. He would invite us to break the silence with love, with art, with protest, with community care. He would remind us that the work is tender as well as fierce.

What would Tupac do? He would rage at the silence. He would cry for the dead. He would love his people enough to risk everything to tell the truth. Thirty years later, that is still the map. Rage and tenderness. Truth and survival. Kindness with fire behind it. That is how we honor his legacy, and Assata’s, and every voice that refused to let America hide from itself.

The question now is not just what Tupac would do. It is what we will do.

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Tasha Monroe

Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.

Writer & Editor, The Commons Dispatch