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Maya Angelou tells Dave Chappelle about that time she met Tupac.

Bonus: an interview with Ray Luv, a friend of Tupac, on the rapper's poetic side

When the "Caged Bird" met the "Rose": Maya Angelou, Tupac Shakur, and the power of empathy

Five shots couldn't drop me,
I took it and smiled,
Now I'm back to set the record straight,
With my A-K,
I'm still the thug that you love to hate.
— 2pac, “Hit Em Up"




To the public, politicians, and the media that covered him, Tupac Shakur was the textbook definition of a "thug" — an uncontrollable monster that was poisoning the minds of our youth and corroding our moral fabric. If you looked at him funny, he'd get in your face. If you punched him, he and his posse would jump you. If you shot at him, well…

That's why his chance encounter with Dr. Maya Angelou stood out to most folks.


In 1992, Dr. Angelou was invited by director John Singleton to make a cameo performance in the film "Poetic Justice" starring Janet Jackson and Tupac.

Watch Dr. Angelou explain her unlikely encounter with Tupac to Dave Chappelle:

The story goes like this: As she was coming out of her trailer, she saw an angry young man in a confrontation, and she gently approached the man to ask to speak with him. He continued cursing, but Dr. Angelou — always with gentle but firm persistence — asked him this piercing question:

"When's the last time anyone told you how important you are?"

She reminded him about what his ancestors went through — traveling on slave ships, lying next to one another in their own menstruation and excrement, standing on auction blocks. She explained how they survived all of that for him to be where he is today. It brought the young man to tears.

As she returned to her trailer, Janet Jackson came running to her to explain how she had just confronted Tupac Shakur. Dr. Angelou then exclaimed, "I didn't know Tupac Shakur. I didn't know 'six-pack'! I had never heard the name!"

Many people were interested in the story simply for the fact that two icons of the black community — who seemingly couldn't be any more different — crossed paths this way, and that Dr. Angelou was able to bring a seemingly hardened gangster rapper like Tupac to tears.

But there's more to it. This is a story about the power of empathy, about meeting ferocity with love, about bravado, about seeing past a facade that society forced a young black man to construct. To really understand the power of this moment, you have to go deeper.

An interview with Ray Luv, a friend of Tupac

I had the opportunity to sit down for an exclusive interview with Ray Luv, a longtime friend of Tupac's. On a perfect early spring day in Los Angeles, we met up at The Roosevelt Hotel, just around the corner from where the Oscars had been held a few days before.

Ray's got a deep voice, and when he speaks, you can almost hear the bass of his voice echo inside his chest. He speaks with a passion for social justice and shares a lot of the same revolutionary fire that made Tupac so different from the rest of the hip-hop world.

Talking to a 42-year-old Ray and seeing him there with his sons, you can hear the passion of his youth, but it's moderated by the wisdom that comes from the ups and downs of life. I couldn't help but wonder what Tupac would have been like had he lived to 42.

Growing up politically aware

My mother never let me forget my history,
Hoping I was set free chains never put on me,
Wanted to be more than just free,
Had to know the true facts about my history.
— 2pac, "Panther Power"



Ray first met Pac when they were both in high school. Ray had been living on his own since 15. Like Tupac, he had come from a home shadowed by addiction, and also like Tupac, he had gone from a black junior high and enrolled in a predominantly white high school. What really brought them together, though, was a shared passion and drive to make it in the rap game.

They soon met Leila Steinberg, who held writing workshops and a poetry circle in the community. Seeing their circumstances at home, Leila decided to take them in, and under her care, they developed an appreciation of poetry and a hunger for knowledge.

 "Leila was kinda like our third piece," says Ray, "because she opened us up more to the poetry side of things. Not that we weren't doing it. It's just that there was nobody there to cultivate it, to expose us to a lot of the new material that ultimately helped us to create the deeper songs. The songs like 'So Many Tears.'"

But even prior to meeting Leila, Tupac was already well-versed in the history of the African-American community. The revolutionary streak ran thick in his bloodline. His mother, Afeni Shakur, was a Black Panther. His stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, was a former member of the Black Liberation Army and is still serving time. His aunt, Assata Shakur, is currently living in Cuba under political asylum (yes, that Assata from the song by Common, which, side note, is why many were upset when Common was invited to the White House). This upbringing gave Tupac a solid grounding in activism and a passion to stand up for the injustices done to the black community.

So, while Maya Angelou didn't know Tupac from a six-pack, Pac was intimately familiar with her work.

"He had no chill, no off button."

Bought a fo'-five cause I heard that the slug's bigger,
Figure the first motherfucker to jump'll find hisself,
Gettin' swept off his feet by the pump.
— 2pac, "Definition of a Thug Nigga"


As thoughtful as Tupac was, there's no doubt he had a temper. It was there from day one.

 "He had no chill ... no chill button," says Ray. "No off switch, none of that. I just spent an afternoon with his mother just chilling and talking, and she still has no chill switch, and she's like late-60s."

Ray explained how most people would pick their battles, but Tupac couldn't walk away from a fight. In fact, at a panel during the opening of the Tupac exhibit at the GRAMMY Museum in LA, friends like Ray and Money B from Digital Underground explained how you couldn't really consider yourself a friend of Tupac's if you had never gotten in an argument with him. Money B joked that "calm down" was his trigger phrase. If you asked him to calm down mid-fight, he'd take it from a 10 to a 12.

 "That's something that is always said every time a black person does a little too much," says Ray. "It's like, 'calm down,' because, you know, the white people are watching. When, in actuality, there's some things that you should be pissed off about. You shouldn't burn down your neighborhood, but maybe you should stand up and say 'This is some bullshit. We can do better. We should do better.' Tupac was that guy — the guy who felt like he had to fight every fight and felt like he was the one that had to fight because if he didn't, who would?"

In the following clip, Tupac talks about his frustration with the shadow cast by the alter ego he created to defend himself. If you had an intruder in your house, he says, you wouldn't speak with a quiet voice. You'd puff out your chest and act threatening. The same went for Tupac. He felt like he had to create this bravado image to protect himself, but he was increasingly frustrated that it came to define him.

  

Yes, this alter ego — originally created as a defense mechanism — became the only thing people knew about him. But Ray says, "That's why Pac was so appealing to my generation. It was a generation full of angry kids."

It was precisely that anger and aggression put into poetic words that expressed the frustrations of a generation who had seen their family units torn apart, forced to fight poverty, drugs, crime, and police brutality, fighting for survival on all fronts. Yet, the same characteristic that drew so many people to Tupac trapped him in a crude caricature of a single facet of his complicated personality.

The 'Bird' meets the 'Rose'

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
— Maya Angelou, “ Caged Bird"






In 1992, fresh off the critical acclaim of "Boyz n the Hood," John Singleton began filming "Poetic Justice" in Simi Valley, a sleepy suburb of LA. Tupac, then only 21 years old, had only one album to his name, "2Pacalypse Now."

During the filming of the movie, the LA riots broke out. It was this volatile mix — a young man coming into fame, racial tensions reaching a boiling point, a militant upbringing, a short temper, being trapped in an alter ego of his own creation — that Maya Angelou first encountered.

What was it about Dr. Angelou that pierced through all of his defense mechanisms? I asked Ray to talk about it.

 "Well, you know, that was the thing, too, about our generation is that we lost our parents," says Ray. "We were the first kids to really lose our parents. Like, my parents had parents [around], you know what I mean? They can remember a clear village raising the child — you know grandparents, the whole thing. My generation kinda had the streets ... and I think that [Dr. Angelou] looked at him in a way that [was] really the way we always wanted to be looked at by the older black generation, that we were their kids, not that we were some kind of fuckin', you know, mutant thing that happened, that they don't understand, that they're afraid of."

Not only was this new generation of voices from the black community shouted down, told to be quiet, told to work within the system, but they also faced people like C. Delores Tucker from within their own community publicly shaming them, attacking them, but never once sitting down with any of them to have dialogue.

So, at the surface, we saw Tupac as angry, militant, and foul-mouthed. But underneath was this complicated mix of upbringing, personality, circumstance, and culture that influenced all his interactions with people.

Dr. Angelou didn't need to know his history to know that he was a young kid who needed to be reminded of his worth. She spoke to him about the history of his people because she knew it was a shared pain. Tupac knew it not only from reading about it, but from living it himself.

In the next clip, Tupac paraphrases from his famous poem, "The Rose That Grew From Concrete." He talks about how if you see a rose growing from the concrete, you marvel at its tenacity for making it that far, rather than tear it down for its imperfections. So, he asks, why don't we celebrate the fact that he made it out from the unlikeliest of circumstances, rather than tear him down for his outward appearance?

 

 

This was the deep empathy of Maya Angelou touching the heart of a fierce, compassionate, intelligent, complicated, and misunderstood young Tupac Shakur. It's a lesson we should remember today.

It is amazing what barriers can be broken down when we see beyond the surface and when someone feels truly heard.

Pop Culture

'Wicked' author says one line in 'The Wizard of Oz' inspired Elphaba and Glinda's backstory

Gregory Maguire says he "fell down to the ground" laughing when the idea hit him.

Public domain

The two witches in "The Wizard of Oz" clearly had a history together.

Have you ever watched a movie or read a book or listened to a piece of music and wondered, "How did they come up with that idea?" The creative process is so enigmatic even artists themselves don't always know where their ideas come from, so It's a treat when we get to hear the genesis of a brilliant idea straight from the horse's mouth. If you've watched "Wicked" and wondered where the idea for the friendship between Elphaba (the Wicked Witch) and Glinda (the Good Witch) came from, the author of the book has shared the precise moment it came to him.

The hit movie "Wicked" is based on the 20-year-old hit stage musical, which is based on the novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" written by Gregory Maguire. While the musical is a simplified version of the 1995 book, the basic storyline—the origin story of the two witches from "The Wizard of Oz"—lies at the heart of both. In an interview with BBC, Maguire explained how Elphaba and Glinda's friendship popped into his head.

 

Maguire was visiting Beatrix Potter's farm in Cumbria, England, and thinking about "The Wizard of Oz," which he had loved as a child and thought could be an interesting basis for a story about evil.

"I thought 'alright, what do we know about 'The Wizard of Oz' from our memories,'" he said. "We have the house falling on the witch. What do we know about that witch? All we know about that witch is that she has feet. So I began to think about Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West…

 glinda, elphaba, wicked,  In "Wicked," the two Oz witches met as students at Shiz University.  Giphy GIF by Wicked 

"There is one scene in the 1939 film where Billie Burke [Glinda the Good Witch] comes down looking all pink and fluffy, and Margaret Hamilton [the Wicked Witch of the West] is all crawed and crabbed and she says something like, 'I might have known you'd be behind this, Glinda!' This was my memory, and I thought, now why is she using Glinda's first name? They have known each other. Maybe they've known each other for a long time. Maybe they went to college together. And I fell down onto the ground in the Lake District laughing at the thought that they had gone to college together."

In "Wicked," Glinda and the Wicked Witch, Elphaba, meet as students at Shiz University, a school of wizardry. They get placed as roommates, loathe each other at first, but eventually become best friends. The story grows a lot more complicated from there (and the novel goes darker than the stage play), but it's the character development of the two witches and their relationship with one another that force us to examine our ideas about good and evil.

  - YouTube  youtu.be  

 

Maguire also shared with the Denver Center for Performing Arts what had inspired him to use the "Wizard of Oz" characters in the first place.

"I was living in London in the early 1990’s during the start of the Gulf War. I was interested to see how my own blood temperature chilled at reading a headline in the usually cautious British newspaper, the Times of London: 'Sadaam Hussein: The New Hitler?' I caught myself ready to have a fully formed political opinion about the Gulf War and the necessity of action against Sadaam Hussein on the basis of how that headline made me feel. The use of the word Hitler – what a word! What it evokes! When a few months later several young schoolboys kidnapped and killed a toddler, the British press paid much attention to the nature of the crime. I became interested in the nature of evil, and whether one really could be born bad. I considered briefly writing a novel about Hitler but discarded the notion due to my general discomfort with the reality of those times. But when I realized that nobody had ever written about the second most evil character in our collective American subconscious, the Wicked Witch of the West, I thought I had experienced a small moment of inspiration. Everybody in America knows who the Wicked Witch of the West is, but nobody really knows anything about her. There is more to her than meets the eye."

 wizard of oz, wicked witch of the west The Wicked Witch of the West has a story of her own.  Giphy  

Authors and artists—and their ideas—help hold a mirror up to humanity for us to see and reflect on who we are, and "Wicked" is one of those stories that makes us take a hard look at what we're seeing in that mirror. Thanks, Gregory Maguire, for launching us on a collective journey that not only entertains but has the potential to change how we see one another.

This story originally appeared last year.

via Josie Bowers / TikTok

Josie Bowers, a 19-year-old woman from Canada, shared the story of how she thwarted an intruder when she was 15. The viral TikTok video is a harrowing tale and a valuable lesson for everyone to learn. Josie was staying with her family at the Ocean City Hilton in Ocean City, Maryland, when the incident occurred.

She went to her hotel room alone to take a shower while her family was on the beach. After getting out of the shower, she was alarmed when she noticed a long wire with a hook at the end wiggling its way out of the crack at the bottom of the front door. The hook was waving around, trying to catch the handle to open the door. It's amazing that no one in the hallway noticed the incredibly suspicious activity.

The intruders eventually caught the handle with the wire and pulled it down to enter the room. Without hesitation, Josie slammed the door shut and put on the deadbolt. "My main thought was holy sh*t, I'm in a towel right now and someone is about to break in and get me," she said on TikTok. "So the door opens a crack, and I just slammed it back shut and put the deadbolt on."

After the door was shut on the intruders, they pretended to work for the hotel. "So they tell me your keycard is broken and we need to get into the room and fix your keypad for you," she continued. "And so I open the door a tad bit, to see if it was a worker. It clearly wasn't, they were in jeans and a T-shirt. Hilton keeps it pretty classy, not the attire."

@josiebowers10

Reply to @emmade1rey #part2

Josie then remembered a trick that her stepfather, who's a police officer, once told her: Never let people know you're alone.

"I yelled 'Hey dad, there's someone here to fix the door.' As soon as they thought that I wasn't alone – and potentially my dad was there – they ran, they were gone," she said. A lot of people freeze in such a stressful situation but Josie was able to remember her stepfather's advice and it made all the difference.

Given their reaction, it's pretty clear that the intruders must have followed her up from the beach or had some inside information to know that she was alone. They didn't want anything to do with her father. "So I think I'm very smart for this one, my stepdad is a police officer, he taught me never to let people know you're alone. I yelled 'Hey dad, there's someone here to fix the door.' As soon as they thought that I wasn't alone, and potentially my dad was there. They ran, they were gone," she said.

@josiebowers10

Reply to @lionacreates #part3 #oceancity

The TikTokker shared the video to show others what they should do in a similar situation and to remind them to never let anyone know they are alone.

"I'm glad I had this experience so I can teach people about it. Obviously, I'm safe but it could have ended up a lot worse," she said. "Be safe, you can get door stoppers, always put on the deadbolt."


This article originally appeared four years ago.

via James Breakwell/X

All parents have had similar convos with thier kiddos.

Raising kids is tough, but there's a lot of laughs along the way. Especially when actual conversations start, as kids begin trying to make sense out of the world around them, ask questions, and test mommy and daddy's resolve.

Back in 2018, comedy writer and children's book author James Breakwell, with four daughters who were all under the age of eight at the time, shared their hilarious conversations on X. From these tweets, it looks like comedy runs in the family. Here's a sampling of some Breakwell's funniest kid-inspired tweets.

 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

While Breakwell's 7-year-old wasn't as heavily featured, when she was quoted, the sarcasm was palpable. Which makes sense, considering that kiddos begin understanding this mechanism around that age.

 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

Kids really do say the darnedest things, and we love them for it. It one of the many, many ways then bring so much joy to the world. It almost makes up for the headaches and sleepless nights, doesn't it.

This article originally appeared seven years ago.

Remember things being built to last?

Americans are well aware of shrinkflation, where food companies reduce the sizes of their products while the price remains the same at the grocery store. You see this in fast food restaurants when you pick up a burger and feel like your hand has grown a few inches, and at the supermarket when you buy a box of cookies, it weighs less than it did a few weeks ago. Companies use this strategy when they think you’ll be less likely to notice a dip in quantity than a hike in the price.

We see something similar in the world of retail, particularly fast fashion. Fast fashion offers cheaper garments made from low-quality materials that last about as long as the trend does, so people can throw them away and buy the next hot thing. This can be a real problem because fast fashion harms the environment and leads to exploitative labor practices. And the tough part is—even for the most conscious of consumer, it's hard to escape from.

Here's a prime example of what this looks like in the real world. A few months ago, a TikTokker named Tom (@SideMoneyTom), popular for making videos about consumer products, went viral for a video where he called out shoe manufacturers for dropping their quality while keeping prices high. “So many of you guys want to shoot the messenger, but look, it's not my fault shoes are made out of Styrofoam and oil now,” Tom says in a TikTok with over 528,000 views. “It's literally every shoe you look at now. It's not even just the cheap ones. I can find hundred dollar plus pairs of shoes all day long with glue squeezing out of their Styrofoam cracks.”

 
 @sidemoneytom Replying to @Oscar Magaña shoes are done #fyp #shoes #foryou ♬ original sound - SideMoneyTom 
 
 

Tom notes that recently, shoes have been made with foam soles instead of rubber. Both have pros and cons. Foam is a little more comfortable, but rubber lasts a lot longer. Rubber shoes keep shape and support over time and are much more durable. Conversely, foam shoes compress over time, losing their support and comfort. When companies sell cheaper shoes that wear out more quickly, they make much more money because you must keep replacing them.

In the video, Tom adds that many companies that used to have shoes made with rubber heels, such as Carhartt and Timberland, have switched to foam. This is an interesting choice for brands that pride themselves on selling durable products.

Cora Harrington, a writer and lingerie expert, says that companies aren't entirely to blame. Americans don’t want to pay higher prices. “People don’t exactly want to pay more for all that stuff,” Harrington told Vox. "So what has to happen if everything is more expensive and the customers still want to pay the same price, something has to be cut and that’s often going to be the quality of the garment.”

“There is an entire generation of consumers at this point that doesn’t actually know what high-quality clothing feels like and looks like,” Harrington continues. “It gets easier, I think, for consumers to just not know any better.”

Many commenters have noticed the decline in shoe quality and praised Tom for pointing it out. "I am so happy I’m not the only one who is baffled by shoes being made of styrofoam and then being upcharged for them," one commenter wrote. "When shoes started being named some version of 'Air Light Cloud float,' my thought was it was because they went from quality rubber to cheap foam and less materials,” another commenter added.

Tom believes the decline in shoe quality is an example of a more significant trend affecting American consumers' products: quality is decreasing while prices remain the same. “The quality of everything is going to hell, and the prices are going up," Tom concludes his video. "The problem is, so many of us have just become used to it that we keep buying it, and we basically allow them to dumb down the quality of everything. Everything in our lives. These shoes are just the tip of the iceberg. Start thinking about it in your life. What are you gonna allow to be garbage quality?"

This article originally appeared in March.

Boomer panic is real.

In a video posted in September 2023, TikToker @myexistentialdread used the phrase “boomer panic” to explain how baby boomers (1946 to 1964) can quickly become unhinged when faced with the most minor problems. It all started when she visited a Lowe’s hardware store and encountered a boomer-aged woman working at the check-out stand.

“I had a dowel that didn’t have a price tag on it, whatever, so I ran back and took a photo of the price tag. And as I was walking back towards her, I was holding up my phone… because I had multiple dowels and that was the one that didn’t have the price tag on it,” she said in the video. “And she looks at me and she goes, ‘I don’t know which one that is,’ and she starts like, panicking.” The TikToker said that the woman was “screechy, panicking for no reason.”

 older woman upset, boomer reactions, boomer panic Older people can become frustrated over seemingly small things.Photo credit: Canva

Many people raised by boomers understood what she meant by "boomer panic." "Boomer panic is such a good phrase for this! Minor inconvenience straight to panic," the most popular commenter wrote. And while there was some unfortunate boomer-bashing in the comments, some younger people tried to explain why the older folks have such a hard time regulating their emotions: “From conversations with my mother, they weren’t allowed to make mistakes and were harshly punished if they did.” The TikToker responded, “A lot of people mentioned this, and it breaks my heart. I think you’re right,” Myexistentialdread responded.

A follow-up video by YourTango Editor Brian Sundholm tried to explain boomer panic in an empathetic way.

 

“Well, it's likely that there actually was a reason the woman started panicking about a seemingly meaningless problem,” Sundholm said. “Most of us nowadays know the importance of recognizing and feeling our emotions.” Sundholm then quoted therapist Mitzi Bachman, who says that when people bottle up their emotions and refuse to express them, it can result in an "unhinged" reaction.

TikToker Gabi Day shared a similar phenomenon she noticed with her boomer mom; she called the behavior “anxiety-at-you.”

Day’s boomer mother was “reactive,” “nervous,” and “anxious” throughout her childhood. Now, she is still on edge with Day’s children. “She's immediately like gasping and just really like exaggerated physical reactions, and then, of course, that kind of startles my kid,” Day said. “Again, I know that this comes from a place of care. It's just a lot,” she continued.

@itsgabiday

It comes from a place of love but it is exhausting 🫠😬 #millennialmomsoftiktok #boomergrandma #reparenting #gentleparenting

 

There is a significant difference in emotional intelligence and regulation between how boomers were raised and how younger generations, such as Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z, were brought up. Boomers grew up when they had to bottle up their feelings to show their resilience. This can lead to growing anger, frustration with situations and people, chronic stress, and anxiety—all conditions that can lead to panicky, unhinged behavior.

Ultimately, Sundholm says that we should sympathize with boomers who have difficulty regulating their emotions and see it as an example of the great strides subsequent generations have made in managing their mental health. “It may seem a little harsh to call something 'boomer panic,' but in the context of how many of them were raised, it makes a lot of sense,” Sundholm says. “It also underlines the importance of emotional regulation skills and teaching them to future generations. And maybe most important, having compassion for those who never had a chance to learn them.”

 older person's hands holding a younger person's hands, compassion for elderly Having compassion for older generations can go a long way.Photo credit: Canva

This article originally appeared in March.