Tupac uses the idiom "Forty acres and a mule." What is this term referring to?

Something given by the government.

Explanation:

The phrase refers to a promise made during the Civil War by Union general William T. Sherman that freed slaves would receive 40 acres of land and a mule. However, after the war that land was given back to its original owners.

The phrase "forty acres and a mule" evokes the Federal government's failure to redistribute land after the Civil War and the economic hardship that African Americans suffered as a result. As Northern armies moved through the South at the end of the war, blacks began cultivating land abandoned by whites.