“The film is talking about very real problems that are happening today,” he told E! “Whether we talk about them or not, whether we have a film about them or not, they’re gonna happen…But it’s not Ernest Dickerson‘s Juice that makes people go and fight.”
Tupac continued, “It doesn’t take a 20-year-old young Black man to tell the world to get off this violence at the theater thing. It’s a double standard because every movie that’s out today, there’s a gun and nobody notices that except when it happens with a Black film. Nobody recognizes the red and the blue in the poster unless it’s a Black film.”
He went on to address a specific sort of violence—one that occurs by the hand of the police.
“Like Rodney King. Really, it’s happened to me,” Tupac alleges. “The police beat me up in the middle of the street for no reason—just simply because I cursed at them. ‘Cause they were harassing me. And I cursed at them. Then they beat me up.”
Instead of responding with violence against the police in real-life, Tupac explained that he did so with his music.
“In my rhymes, it vents that anger because I can fire back at the police and I won’t go to jail for life,” Tupac expressed. “My music, and a lot of this music, it’s only talking about the oppressed rising up against the oppressor.”
