Tupac Rhetoric

4) Tupac starts the song with a very clear statement “I’m tired of bein’ poor and, even worse, I’m black” that announces what the song’s is going to talk about. In a decade where police brutality in Afro-American neighbourhood was a real debate, Tupac claims “Cops give a damn about a negro, Pull the trigger, kill a nigga, he’s a hero”. Problems are never far from you in these communities even for the younger “Give the crack to the kids, who the hell care? One less hungry mouth on the welfare!”. In this song, Tupac seems to put the fault on the system that doesn’t help them in any way. These inequalities are necessary to keep the American system on track. As an example, the singer says “First ship’em dope and let’em deal to brothers. Give ‘em guns, take a step back, watch them kill each other”. In the second verse, Tupac puts more accent on racism “I see no changes, all I see is racist faces. Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races”. Overall, lyrics undoubtedly shows the presence of an ethical issue and the author protest by saying that things need to change all along the song “We gotta start makin’ changes, learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers”.

Three moral agents are present in this song. Racist people are obviously making the problem worse because they sink Afro-American communities by not respecting equality of chances. The
hatred only raises the differences in a country that’s supposed to be equal. Furthermore, according to Tupac, the police is another part of the problem. They are supposedly less tolerant on black people and have tendencies to power abuse while patrolling in these communities. Many times, along the song, Tupac mentions that low-income communities are let to themselves and the government does not make any effort to get rid of problems like violence and drugs and slowly rehabilitate those places. This inaction is made on purpose because these problems are gearings in the big influent machine that is the American system. As a solution, Tupac do not expect things to be easy. He only says that people need to start to love each other and that it’s their job to make their world better, nothing is going to change by itself. “Let’s change the way we treat each other, you see the old wasn’t workin’, so it’s on us to do what we gotta do to survive”. Briefly, they need to start working on their problems by themselves instead of waiting for the system to help them.

One of the values I can obviously link with this song is love.
Maybe the religious background of the author influenced him to claim that people need to start loving each other to reduce hate in our world and therefore help to get rid of inequalities problems. The most evident value to find in this song is equality. That’s what the ethical issue is all about, Tupac asks for a country without low-income communities where problems are multiplicated by 10. Another value could be work because Tupac asks people to get up and work hard to change things. This value is an important part of the solution proposed by the
author.