Back in 1993, 2Pac sat down with The Source for an interview and the late rapper made some disparaging remarks about music legend Quincy Jones. “All he does is stick his d—k in white b—es and make f—ed up kids,” Pac said at the time.
This infuriated a then 17-year-old Rashida Jones, so much so that she wrote an open letter to the magazine in defense of her father. In her letter she tore into Shakur’s interview, starting it off by saying, “Because I am the youngest of Quincy Jones’ six daughters, I cannot view this article or this man without bias [“War Stories” by Kim Green, Aug, ’93]. But I do think that anyone who reads this article would be shocked by his ignorance and lack of respect for his people.”
Adding, “To demean a man like Quincy Jones, a man who came from the ghetto of Chicago and through his talent and perseverance became a living music legend, demeans the whole progress of African Americans.” She then ended her letter by saying, “Where the hell would you be if Black people like him hadn’t paved the way for you to even have the opportunity to express yourself? I don’t see you fighting for you race. In my Opinion, you’re destroying it and shitting all over your people.”
The actress recalled this incident in a recent profile with The New Yorker and was asked by writer Michael Schulman how their relationship evolved after the letter and once he started dating her older sister Kidada Jones. “Furious! So precocious, so self-righteous. Yeah, I was so mad,” she answered. “It was a new perspective to me. I kind of understand the nuance more now that I’m older. It just felt like a completely unwarranted attack.”
She then added that she was interning at Warner Bros. Records when she wrote the letter. “I printed it off my word processor and put it in an envelope and sent it to The Source,” she recalled. “I was interning at Warner Bros. Records that summer, so I think I wrote it there. Maybe I had the other intern proof it for me.” The actress then said ‘Pac mistook her older sister Kidada for her in New York and apologized, saying, “And then my sister was out somewhere in New York, and Tupac came up to apologize to her, because he thought it was me.”
She continued by saying, “It resolved itself really nicely, because when I met him, he immediately apologized to me, immediately apologized to my dad. We sat down and had a really good conversation about it, and then he was family.”
Rashida took the experience as a lesson, saying, “That was an early lesson for me, because I have been self-righteous in my life, and I really have worked hard to stop looking at things in a binary way. We’re so flawed and so complicated.”
Quincy wasn’t a fan of the late rapper dating his daughter either, telling The New York Times in 2012 that he “wasn’t happy at first.”
But, eventually they mended fences and squashed things. “He’d attacked me for having all these white wives. And my daughter Rashida, who was at Harvard, wrote a letter to The Source taking him apart,” he said. “I remember one night I was dropping Rashida at Jerry’s delicatessen, and Tupac was talking to Kidada because he was falling in love with her then. Like an idiot, I went over to him, put two arms on his shoulders and said, ‘Pac, we gotta sit down and talk, man.’”
Adding, “If he had had a gun, I would’ve been done. But we talked. He apologized. We became very close after that.”
Rashida would go on to forge a friendship with Shakur and even wrote a paper on him during her junior year of college.
