Being his first album to go double platinum, “Me Against the World” was written by rap star Tupac Shakur where he published a piece of work that reflected his early life. “Dear Mama”, provides lyrics not only for his mother but for all single mothers who have faced several endeavors trying to raise their children through hardship, discrimination, and city violence.
Analyzing through historical criticism, Tupac Shakur repeatedly writes how he grew up with a single mother – no father and the hardships his mother faced to raise both him and his sister on her own while returning to drugs. “Even though you were a crack fiend, mama you always was a black queen, mama” (Shakur 20). Throughout the eighties, nearly all African American mothers raised their children alone. More than “forty-eight percent of all black families with children and fifty-six percent of black single-mother families had incomes below the official poverty threshold” (Nichols-Casebolt 306). This data recovered from Nichols-Casebolt can give an explanation for the cause of young children during that time who made it so hard for their mothers to raise them. These single women, being the sole providers and heads of their household are possibly working not one but possibly two or three jobs. The children of the African-American single mothers, possibly having no stability at home because their mother is always at work, can be why they ran the streets and caused trouble, making it hard for their mother to keep up with them. Among African American families with children, in 1984 “the single-mother family was the predominant family” (Nichols-Casebolt 306). Sixty percent of all black families that year were single-mother based families. “Dear Mama” spoke poverty, hoping for people to believe the importance of the song. The statistics found by Nichols-Casebolt focus on the deprivation that “single-mother” (Nichols-Casebolt 306) families faced, proving...