The Ballad of Lost Boyz

This is the start of something different. Are you willing to join me?

Tupac and half-sister, Sekyiwa. Imagine source: 2paclegacy.net

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If you like my substack and want to find some offline reading, check out “Words For My Comrades, A Political History of Tupac Shakur” by Dean Van Nguyen. This book has got me in a choke hold, I can’t get enough of it!

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Some people call me a dreamer, and even more call me delusional. These comments used to make me uncomfortable. I would try to bend my beliefs to fit into a framework that others could understand, but no matter how hard I tried, the real me would eventually begin to come out. It’s a lesson I have learned with painful regularity: no matter where you go, there you will be. And if who you are is inevitable, the best you can do is learn to love and accept that person. I have spent much of my 30s learning this “real me.” In that journey, I have been given the greatest gift a person can ask for: forgiveness and understanding.

I think many of us go through life feeling a deep desire to be loved unconditionally and understood. That desire can sometimes be the vehicle that drives us towards the person we will become, and if that is true, society must provide the fuel. So what happens when society tells you your vision of yourself is wrong? What do you do when society throws obstacles in your path that not only short-circuit your development, they take pieces of you? Society is beautiful; we need the community of people and shared agreements to survive in the long term, but as helpful and empowering as this can be, society can also be the poison pill that sends us down a spiral.

I have been thinking a lot about this recently, for two reasons. First, as I continue to do the work to heal my heart and love myself, I have discovered a newfound belief in a radical idea. That idea is that all boys begin with pure hearts. All little boys desire love and acceptance; all boys want to be held, feel, grow, and be surrounded by those who are important to them. If that is true, something must have happened between the day they were born into this world and transitioned into men. Whatever that “thing” was, it shifted their trajectory. I guess that’s why people think I’m delusional, I believe in the humanity of men. The second reason I have been thinking about this a lot more is because of a book I just completed.

“Words For My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur” is a newly released book by Dean Van Nguyen. The book expertly tells the political story of Tupac’s life and how the radicalization he grew up in impacted his music and, by extension, the world. But more than that, it walks you through two generations of justice, hurt, love, pain, and trauma, by not only telling his story, but the story of his mother. We get to see a clearer picture of who the man was. This makes perfect sense because you can’t truly understand Tupac if you don’t understand Afeni.

Before this book, I didn’t know nearly enough about her. Today, most people remember Afeni as Tupac’s mother, and while that is something to be proud of, her life and impact on this world go so much further than that. As a member of the Black Panther Party, a political prisoner, and one of the Panther 21. A group of Black Panthers who were arrested and accused of trying to bomb several locations in New York City. Afeni represented herself in a sham of a trial organized by the federal government. She did all of this while sitting in jail, fighting with guards to make sure she received the nutrients necessary to nurse her pregnant body.

Before PAC took a single breath in this world, he was in a cage built by oppressors, and the fight was always in his blood. And once he was born, the struggle didn’t change. During his first days in this world, she worried about his safety and didn’t initially list his name on the certificate. According to “Words from my Comrade’s,” she first listed his name as Lesane Parish Crooks for fear that the government would target him.

While Pac was described as a kind child, “full of joy,” the realities of life would soon begin to color his experiences. After years of working as an organizer/activist, Afeni suffered from the trauma of her experiences and fell into addiction while raising her son and his sister. Growing up, he would always try to keep a positive spin on his life, but the chaos and inconsistency he dealt with were challenging in more ways than one. There were times when he and his sister went without food, when his mother, because of her addiction, had strange and potentially dangerous people in the home, desperate to take care of his family, he faced a level of exposure to the underbelly of life that should never have happened. Without a consistent father figure in his life, Pac was forced to learn and “become a man” all at once. This, along with constant harassment from the police and inconsistent housing, led him and his family to move from New York to Baltimore and then, finally, to California.

We love Pac because of his beautiful poetry and sharp political analysis, but those skills were developed as he navigated the world as a Black boy; it’s not an experience for the weak. What we ended up with was a young man with endless potential and a bottomless pit of hurt and pain.

Despite the shadows that hung over him, PAC was a shining light that was tragically shot down before he saw his full potential. It is the story of every boy in the world. Like him, they are born with unlimited possibilities, wanting to be loved, full of joy, and trying to figure out their place in the world. But then life arrives with all of its challenges, and people chip away at the light. Sometimes purposefully and with malicious intent, but most of the time through sheer ignorance.

I have written a lot about how society has let men/boys down, and I don’t mean to be a broken record, but it has to be said. We are setting our boys up to be prisoners in their minds until society sentences them to death. That prison is the Man box, a metaphysical structure created by unhealthy ideas of what men should be. This box makes a parameter for what is “Masculine” and what is weak, and then eeks out punishment to those who do not stay in that box. The executioners of that punishment are the people in their lives. Their friends, family, neighbors, supporters, and sometimes rivals. But more often than not, it comes from the people we love. If we want to break this prison for others, we must first break it ourselves. So here is the truth for you all to know.

Boys and Men, just like Girls and women, deserve to be hugged, and told they are important, they deserve to be able to cry, they deserve to feel, and they should be allowed to be unsure. Society tells us that men who desire these things, who show vulnerability, who signal they are gentle, are not worth existing, so we learn to turn those parts of ourselves off. No one likes what this turns us into, but for some reason, the most celebrated version of masculinity is the manifestation of the monsters we become from this outside pressure. PAC was n artist, he wanted to write poetry and talk about love, but his surroundings forced him to harden up quickly, trust sparingly, and turn to vices to cope. With Pac, we got someone who loved artistry and people, but would sometimes give in to his worst vices, lashing out at others and resorting to violence to feel powerful.

But under that act, there was a lot of pain that couldn’t be processed. After entering the rap game, being known for his high-top fade, trauma from a violent encounter with the police led him to develop alopecia and start losing his hair. His iconic baddie was discovered through the pain he couldn’t communicate. He said as much as he could in his music, but even that had limits, so we only saw pieces of a man who was slowly spiraling, if only we had more empathy for him and others.

The man box tells us that men should be physically dominating, “lead at all costs,” be aggressive, sex crazed, physically indestructible, and only focused on making money. It tells us that if you cannot produce, you are worth nothing; it tells us that we do not have feelings, that to acknowledge anything besides anger is a weakness. The Man box does not make space for artistry, it does not accept or encourage insecurity, and it attacks vulnerability, but if we want our little boys to grow up into men we can be proud of, we must make space for all of this. But it doesn’t end there, if the Man box is the prison, Capitalism is the Warden.

Under the system of capitalism, everyone is told that the pursuit of financial gain at all costs is the ultimate goal, and under this, we have little space for compassion, community, or kindness. In a capitalistic system, you are only as good as your ability to hold resources or horde them, so every relationship is condensed to transactional ones. To make things worse, if you are unable to make the kind of money to excel in this system, you have no value. So what happens to a boy who sees no financial opportunity? In many cases, he becomes someone who doesn’t value himself or values the pursuit of currency over everything else. And if there is no self-love as a grounding, how can they possibly care about anything else?

Under capitalism, the United States Government has leaned further and further towards the interests of the ultra-wealthy, and because of that, we have seen a critical spike in suffering across the board. With that suffering comes a devolving of society, and a resentment that spurs hate. That hate was enough to elect a white supremacist into office, and his hate, one that stems from a childhood full of more pain than we could ever know, is driving us to a place this country may never recover from. But like PAC, and like me, and like so many others, this hateful man known as our “President’ started off as a little boy, and life happened to him in ways that made him who he is today.

PAC is gone, Trump has chosen his path, and millions of little boys are trying to figure things out. The world won’t change overnight, but we get to start the process today. Choose kindness, hug your sons, hold space for dreams, and work towards being a little different than you were the day before. It won’t change everything, but it could give hope to one lost little boy, which will be enough.

Congrats, you made it to the end. What did you think? Share your thoughts in the comments!