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

page 2 of 2

Laura Gardner: You make some very controversial statements about Marcus Garvey, who was the leader of the United Negro Improvement Association, and also an icon of the Rastafari movement. You write, “Garvey popularized a race pride that was xenophobic, anti-Semitic and dismissive of the lessons of history, other than a need for self-mythologization.” Can you expand on this thought?

Gregory Stephens: I have a mixed message about Garvey’s legacy. On one level, I think that Garvey has played an enormously important role in getting people of the African Diaspora to reorient themselves and take pride in their own heritage. If you think about where Rastafarianism comes from, check this out: Malcolm X used to say to people, “If somebody gives you a God that doesn’t look like you, you give that God right back to them.” People of African descent were being shown pictures of this blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus on the wall that didn’t speak to them. So, Garvey came along and understood that [people of African descent] needed to understand that they were God’s children. So they came to understand this through the spectacles of Ethiopia… And they imagined this Emperor, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, as their face of God.

But Garvey has got a lot of problems too. Garvey is deeply anti-Semitic and says some really ugly things about Jewish people and that’s a problem that you will find in much, but not all, of Black Nationalism… He [also] has some really nasty things to say about race mixing... He basically advocates ex-communication if a black person marries a white person, then he advocates a rumor campaign to chase them out of the black community.

Garvey’s cultural orientation is also problematic. He is supposedly re-imagining blackness as a point of pride. Yet he’s dressing himself up in the clothes of British imperialism... If you were to go to Garvey’s lectures in the 1920’s, you’d hear classical music. If you read his columns in the paper, you would find him dismissing jazz music as “barbaric.” …Although he’s supposedly a prophet of black pride, his attitudes were actually very Euro-centric. So I think that we need to learn from the mistakes of history rather than repeat them and there’s both with Garvey.

LG: Marley once sang, “We build your penitentiaries, we build your schools, brainwash education to make us the fool. Your reward for our love is telling us of your God above.” One would think that with this dismissive attitude about Christianity, Marley would disassociate himself completely from western Judeo-Christian beliefs, but he embraces Rastafari, which has deep roots in the Bible. What do you make of this?

GS: The Bible is one of those documents that everybody uses in a different way. There’s so much there that you can read anything you want into it… I think that Marley is an example of a long tradition that looked at the Bible and found lots of support for the notion that the Bible supported black people as equal partners, or even as a new kind of chosen people… I think that Marley and the Rastas were extremely critical of a certain segment of Christianity, which had people putting aside the concerns of this world (i.e. food, clothing and freedom) and thinking about some God above in the sky… At the same time they are firmly committed to many concepts in the Bible... It’s amazing with Bob; when you start looking at his lyrics, it’s half-Bible. So you find Bob saying, “I don’t come to fight flesh and blood, but spiritual wickedness in high and low places.” That comes from Paul. That explains the kind of warfare that Bob and the Rastas were involved in.

He’s engaging in a critique of the whole systemÛthe Babylon system... People would ask Bob, “Is that like a black and white thing?” And he always said no. It’s not about that. It’s about a system of oppression. So when you find Bob quoting these kind of lyrics, you see him engaging in a critique of that system, which includes Christianity, and capitalism as we know it...

There are a whole lot of parallels between Rastas and the Jewish Diaspora. The Jews were taken out of Jerusalem and taken to Babylon.

There on the banks of the Babylon River, they sat down and wept. Remember that tune? They sat down and wept when they remembered Zion. Well, they had to start thinking: is this is a God of the Jews, or is it a God of all people? And in the Old Testament you’ll find a lot of references to the fact that they had re-imagined God as building a house of prayer for all people. The Rastas are going through a really similar process. Just like the Jews at first imagined a Jewish God, the Rastas at first imagined a black God... But Bob is taking this message to this international audience which is Asian, Latin American, European, African and they’re all responding to his use of metaphors such as Exodus in many different ways. In the end they come to understand that although they re-imagined God/Jah through the spectacles of Ethiopia, he’s really a God of all people.

LG: As a parent and educator, how do you think race relations should be taught and synthesized?

GS: That’s a big question! I face that question with my own children every day. I discuss this in my bookÛI am trying to teach my own children about the legacy of slavery. How do you teach that history without dividing the world into black and white? Nowadays when people talk about how to deal with race, they get hung up on the notion that if we have some sense of common ground, we are going to erase our cultural difference.

LG: Do you believe that?

GS: No, I don’t… Check the lyrics of the song, “Is there a place for the hopeless sinner who has hurt all mankind just to save his own?” The answer’s in the chorus: “One Heart,” (i.e., “One Blood”)… Marley’s saying, the only way you can find a community in which commonality and difference can co-exist is if you have a moral philosophy that goes beyond race. I think that that’s the lasting legacy of Marley’s music and that it doesn’t mean erasing one’s cultural heritage. I think that in the long range we have to recognize that race is a fiction… So I believe that we need to teach our children to affirm their cultural heritage but to also understand that when we get involved in racial categories, we isolate ourselves from other people. So we need to develop forms of identity and community in which commonality and difference can co-exist. That requires a language that goes beyond race, and talks about culture.

That’s what Bob means when he says, “Don’t talk to me about black and white. We fly a color which is red, gold and green.” That’s what Rasta is about. He’s saying, yes, I’m African, but I’m also a Rasta. And what is Rasta about? And as I understand the tradition, it’s about three things: It’s about moving beyond a white-supremacist philosophy, which means you can’t just be talking about black supremacism either. The second thing is living a sustainable lifestyleÛvegetarianism and livity. That applies to everybody. If we export all the cars we’re driving over to China, we are going to pave the planet. That is not a lifestyle that can be sustained... The third thing is I’n’I consciousness. God within. That means that we share a community with all the people that understand that. So the Rasta sense of community really goes beyond race.

LG: If readers are interested in race relations where can they go for more information?

GS: It depends on what aspect of race relations they want to explore. If you wanted to learn about the Rastas, I would recommend a Jamaican anthropologist named Barry Chevannes. He has a book called “Rastafari: Roots and Ideology” and he goes down and interviews the Bobos, who are more on the black supremacist tip. But then he also interviews people that are coming out of the Twelve Tribes of Israel branch, so you get a sense of the multi-centeredness of Rasta. Rasta is not a movement that has one center. It has got a lot of different branches.

LG: Just like Christianity, or Judaism or Buddhism…

GS: Exactly…or so-called “white” people or so-called “black” people…

LG: Thank you so much for being here and reasoning with me. I enjoyed the bookÛyou write very accessibly.

GS: Thank you. Showers of blessings on the entire Bay Area massive! Jah blessings.