On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison and Bob Marley

interview by Laura Gardner (January 2000)

“I don’t think enough people look at Bob Marley’s European audience and ask: what is that all about?” Gregory Stephens tells me one sunny day outside of his El Cerrito home, “And what does that mean about cultural ownership?”

Gregory Stephens, who was raised in a devout Christian family in West Texas, has always had an interest in race relations. First sparked by an over-the-top performance by George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars in Pennsylvania and maintained by his involvement in the Austin music scene, he questioned the role race plays in American culture, “The lead singer [of our band] was Afro-American, the back-up singer was Filipina, the bassist was from Argentina, the drummer was a Jew from South Africa. It was a totally mixed band and the audience looked like us, but we were playing what people called 'black music,’ so that was one thing that got my mind working, thinking, 'Just what does it mean to call something by its racial termÛblack music?’”

Having settled down and started a family with a Southern black woman, Gregory now faces the dilemmas of how to raise his two biracial children in modern American society. He mentioned the importance of the central figures in his latest book, “On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison and Bob Marley” [Cambridge University Press] whose portraits cover the walls in his house, as important new “integrative ancestors.”

Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Relations at the University of Oklahoma, Stephens is adamant about getting his message across, “The idea that there’s a separate black and white culture in this country is really a racial mythology.”

I met with Gregory one afternoon in January, and was warmly greeted by his two children at the door. We discussed many of the controversial ideas in his book, as well as some of his personal beliefs about culture and race.

Laura Gardner: Most of your studies have focussed on race relations, primarily between blacks and whites. How did you get interested in this field of study?

Gregory Stephens: Sports, music, I think the way most people do… I was a journalist for the Austin American Statesman, so I was writing mainly about black and Latino forms of music. Sometimes my audience would say, “Well, who the hell are you to criticize our culture?” That set me down the path I guess I’m still on, in terms of why do I feel it is partly our culture too? So, that led to this book to figure out, was I really na‘ve? Or was there a history of this inter-ethnic, interracial interaction in America? The short answer is that the idea that there’s a separate black and white culture in this country is really a racial mythology. If you go and study the history, it’s always created through what Ellison called “antagonistic cooperation.” Whether you focus on the antagonism or the cooperation, the end result is always co-creation…

LG: As a white man, you must encounter attacks/criticisms from both whites and blacks for your studies.

GS: Well, to me, white is the color of a piece of paper. I grew up in a lower-middle class environment, so it’s hard for me to figure out what people mean sometimes when they say “white.” When I look in the mirror, I see a father of two biracial children with whom I speak Spanish. I’ve been involved my whole life in the creation of cultural forms that are deeply influenced by Latin Americans and by people of African descent. So, if people want to call themselves “black” or “white,” then that’s fine, but those are socially created categories…

But there’s always conflict. I visited the University of North Carolina where I gave two speeches to large, predominantly black, Afro-American Studies classes. I did my presentation on Frederick Douglass...

Douglass, of course, fought against slavery, he advised Lincoln, he later became a diplomat in the Caribbean. Late in life he married a white womanÛa feminist, for his second wife. He became this national icon. In 1886, this painter comes [to do his portrait] and says, “Show me your full face, for that is Ethiopian.” Douglass says, “Well take my side face, for that is Caucasian, though should you try my quarter face, you would find it Indian. I don’t know that any race can claim me, but being identified with slaves as I am, I think I know the meaning of the inquiry.” So, he has a public role, a public fa¡ade as the defender of rights for black people. His private concept is that he’s multi-ethnic and his community is multi-ethnic... So what he defined himself against was “racialism,” which he called “diseased inagination.” Douglass believed that the problems of racism can’t be solved with the language of race. You inherit your phenotype, which is blue eyes, kinky hair, thick lips... but you don’t inherit your culture. Race is socially constructed.

When I reached the end of my presentation for these students, where Douglass is expanding his critique of racialism to include other black people, a young dreadlocked woman raised her hand and quoted some of Sister Souljah’s lyrics that go like this: “If your great-great grandfather raped my great-great grandmother, and your great grandfather robbed my great grandfather,” and it goes through the generations up through today, “then how in the world do you expect me to trust you?”

This is her way of attacking the credibility of Douglass, and also my credibility; so that’s supposed to end the conversation right there, if you don’t really know your history. But if you really know your history then there’s an answer to that. What I told this woman is that she’s engaged in racial mythology there... Both [Marley and Douglass] had audiences that were predominantly of European descent. What does that tell us about their movement and about the meaning of freedom that they’re articulating through their speeches or through their songs? …For Douglass it meant that his audience was the 90% of Euro-Americans who did not own slaves. You see the racial mythology?

In the old history, you had “happy” slaves and benevolent slave-owners. And then now people go to the extreme where we’re trying to correct stuff where it’s like every white man had a whip and every black woman was raped. Well, the reality is somewhere in the middle. So, that’s part of what I do, just try to talk about history… 90% of people of European descent in this country did not own slaves… Some of [those 90%] supported slavery, some of them were actively against it, but a lot of them were on the fence somewhere… So the reality is a lot more complex than the racial mythology, which will put all people of one color into the “good” box and people of the other color into the “bad” box. And if we just reversed the categories from what they used to be, I don’t think that’s progress.

LG: But people might argue that the history has been predominantly written by people of European descent.

GS: If you look at the cover of Marley’s “Survival” album, what do you see?

LG: The slave ships.

GS: Yes. Do you know the history of what that album was originally called? It was called “Black Survival” and for marketing considerations they changed it to “Survival,” which Marley okayed. But if you look at the cover, you have African flags and African slave ships. [The image] comes from abolitionist literature, which is put out mainly by British people... So, in other words, people of European descent wrote part of this history. What was the result of that? One of the results is that when you listen to Bob Marley’s music and look at the artwork, he’s talking about a history that has been created by a mixed group of people. And the idea that slavery was wrong, was against the laws of equal rights, was against the Bible, has been put forth by people of many backgrounds.