Example research essay topic: Dis Me Says Tupac Finally Felt White - 1,180 words

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... at fucked-up childhood. The reason why I could get into acting was because it takes nothin' to get out of who I am to get into somebody else. " When Tupac was 12, Afeni enrolled him in the 127 th Street Ensemble, a theater group in Harlem. "I wanted Tupac to focus on something since he was becoming of age, " she says. In his first performance, Tupac played Travis in A Raisin In the Sun. Tupac leans back on the sofa and beams at the memory. "Right now I can remember the bug biting me right there. I lay on a couch and played sleep for the first scene.

Then I woke up and I was the only person onstage. I can remember thinking... " He lowers his voice to a whisper. "'This is the best shit in the world!' That got me real high. I was gettin' a secret: This is what my cousins don't do. " At the same time, though, he was having trouble squaring his mother's political views with his life. "She was trying to make me live this white-picket-fence lifestyle, but yet we ain't got no money and no food and no lights. " Says Tupac: "You want me to go to school? They tellin' me all this stuff about the system but they pushing' us in the system. What type of shit is that?" Perhaps more significantly, Tupac says he felt "unmanly" because he was fatherless. "All my cousins was like, 'You too pretty. ' I didn't have hard features. I don't know, I just didn't feel hard, " he says with exasperation. "I could cook, I could do clothes, I could sew, clean up the house.

I could do all the things my mother could give me but she couldn't give me nothing else. " Tupac admits these are the forces that drove him to the streets of New York. And to the life of Legs, the father he claimed. "I see him in me even now, " he says. A classic city hustler once affiliated with legendary drug kingpin Nicky Barnes, Legs came to live with the family in the early 1980 s and introduced Afeni to crack. "That was our way of socializing, " she acknowledges. "He would come home late at night and stick a pipe in my mouth. " Legs eventually wound up in prison-he had been arrested many times-for credit-card fraud. By the time he was out, Afeni, tired of the hard times in New York, had moved her family to Baltimore. By the time Afeni called back to New York to let Legs know of her move, he had died from a crack-induced heart attack at 41. "That hurt Tupac, " she says, her eyes looking at her bare feet. "It fucked him up.

It was three months before he cried. After he did, he told me, 'I miss my daddy. '"I was real bitter about Legs's death, " Tupac says, "because I believe a mother can't give a son ways on how to be a man. Especially not a black man. It made me bitter seeing all these other niggas with fathers gettin' answers to questions that I have. Even now I still don't get 'em. " Baltimore was the first place Tupac began to feel an identity of his own. "I remember writing my first rap there. My name was MC New York.

That's when I started fitting in. I was starting to get a name. " He auditioned and was accepted by the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he finally felt in touch with himself. And with a different reality. "The white kids had things we never seen. That was the first time I saw there was white people who you could get along with. Before that, I just believed what everybody else said: They was devils. But I loved it.

I loved going to school. It taught me a lot. I was starting to feel like I really wanted to be an artist. " He pauses, grins mischievously: "I was fucking white girls. "I found him to be an extremely talented young actor, " says Donald Hickens, head of the school's theater department. "He was confident and willing to take risks. He was very serious in the studio. " Then Hickens-who is white-adds this: "For Tupac it was a new situation to be around white people who really cared about him and really wanted to help him. I think that shocked his expectations. "I could feel him trying to bring me up, " says Tupac of Hickens. "He couldn't do it, though. I was a little black kid from the ghetto and it was too much.

I could see it in his face, he was trying to help me but it was a problem beyond him. " At the age of 17, after his junior year, Tupac moved with his family to Marin City, California. He never finished high school. He places his hands on top of his head and lets out a big sigh. "Leaving that school affected me so much. Even now, I see that as the point where I got off track. " Marin City is across the bay from Oakland.

Nicknamed "The Jungle" because, according to Tupac, "niggas there like to kick up dust, " it's essentially a housing complex. "When he got to Marin City, " says Afeni, "Tupac was taught the streets. " More to the point, she says, he learned those little lessons about manhood that she couldn't teach him. "I was in the streets before but only as my mother's son, " Tupac says. "Marin City is where I started getting my own name. " With Legs dead and Baltimore behind him, Tupac tried to make it alone. Shortly after arriving in Marin City, he moved in with a neighbor. Tupac sold dope, befriended everyone, and became the running joke in the area. "Niggas that wasn't shit and I knew it used to dis me, " says Tupac. "But I didn't have no money and that's what used to fuck me up. " His lips curl in exaggeration as he spits the words out, full of venom. "It be shitty, dumb niggas who had women, rides, houses, and I ain't have shit. "All through my time there they used to dis me, " says Tupac. "I got love but the kind of love you would give a dog or a neighborhood crack fiend. They liked me because I was at the bottom. " Nevertheless, he finally felt like he belonged somewhere. "It was like a 'hood and I wanted to be a part of it.

If I could just fit in here, I'm cool. And I thought I did. " The underground hip hop scene in Northern California rekindled Tupac's rap ambitions. He auditioned for Shock-G, the leader of Digital Underground, and was hired as a roadie and a dancer-well, sort of. When D.

U. 's "Humpty Dance" blew up, Tupac found himself touring the States and Japan, bumping and grinding wi...

Research essay sample on Dis Me Says Tupac Finally Felt White