 Good evening to everybody and thank you for coming out in the rain The the title as you heard tonight that I chose for the lecture was the new culture of Frederick Douglass and Bob Marley Beyond racialism So I'm kind of trying to think about a big issue here, and that's basically How do we build what Nelson Mandela called a? Multiracial or a non-racial democracy and the basic challenge I set for myself in the book was to think about new forms of identity and of community in which commonality and difference can coexist It seems to me that that's really the challenge that we face Especially here in a state like California where we already have a Minority majority So I'm looking at models of identity and community in my book on racial frontiers of Frederick Douglass Ralph Ellison and Bob Marley models of people who were trying to build a rank a language that goes beyond race so the challenge I see in terms of Coming to know what diversity means as Troy Duster once said over at UC Berkeley is as I said to build new forms of identity and of community and of citizenship and Basically what I'm arguing that this is going to require us to go through individual and collective transformations and in particular that we need to move beyond binary racialized models of identity of community and Towards the formation of new cultures cultures that are capable of both of fighting against injustice but also cultures which are Capable of reclaiming or affirming that which is valuable in our heritage so I think a lot of times now in public discourse that commonality and difference are seen as opposing concepts and I see this as a is an action reaction cycle. It's a historically necessary corrective That we once Excluded a lot of histories and now we're often celebrating differences for its own sake So the people that I studied in my book Marley and Ellison and Douglas were all involved in the same processes of trying to overcome exclusions and to a voice identity but also to to build a vision that Was capable of maintaining commonality and difference Now it just so happens that the three figures the three main figures of my book are what we're accustomed to call black so I'm going to sort of bite the hand that feed me here during black history month and focus on these people particularly Douglas and Marley as icons that should force us to re-examine our habits of Putting people and cultures into racialized boxes There's a way of getting at this question of how do commonality and difference exist in a diverse society? I argue that Douglas and Ellison and Marley were not just black that to see them as such in fact To ghettoize them and to put to confine them within a black box is To perpetuate a form of mental slavery to which they themselves were opposed So blackness was an important part of their identity and of their community But at the same time all of these all of these men saw themselves as representative of a new culture That could not be defined by merely racial terms Now this seems like a paradox in some ways But I I think that it's really only a paradox because we've been blinded many ways by racial mythologies And we view the past through racial mythologies Figures like Douglas and Marley point to an alternative to these binary models to a non-racial democracy as Nelson Mandela said To a beloved community is Martin Luther King was fond of saying or in the words of Bob Marley simply Rasta and we'll talk about that one later on Now the community in which they lived and to which they spoke Was clearly rooted in what we are accustomed to call black culture and Black history and to be sure the fight against racial injustice was central to all of their lives Yet Douglas and Marley in particular made very explicit claims To be part of a community that went beyond race So let me tell you just a little bit about some of the commonalities of the people in my book because this is the first thing People usually ask me is what do these guys have in common and I began answering that in the preface they had several common now commonalities They were all a mixed heritage biologically and Culturally in the case of Douglas and Marley in particular their biracial born to white fathers and black mothers They talk about this a lot and it's central to who they are and the kinds of communication that they engage in They all were enormously successful in using a communication form of their day journalism Literature and music to speak to a vast audience that was multiracial and multinational They also as it turns out all grew up without their fathers None of them had a father around to guide them as they were forming the identity And I think this is an important reason why all of them looked to more distant horizons to imagine new forms of identity and culture And they were all accused in their time of because that they spoke to mixed audiences and didn't define themselves as just black They were all accused of being a sell-out or Insufficiently radical and such so they had similar responses to that I'll leave that to those who you want to hear about it from my book But they they had very interesting responses about the notion of what is Marley said was a true revolutionary So in the book I write that all were inheritors of and co-creators of a new culture That was often racialized in its origins and yet it spoke to a multiethnic and a multinational audience To audiences of the present and of the future for whom Racial language would be inadequate now another thing they all had in common that was that Douglas and Ellison and Marley all believed that the problems of racism Couldn't be solved with the language of race So their really deepest critique was of racialism Which is as Ellison said the insidious confusion between race and culture which haunts our society That's absolutely central to what all of them did to try to make this distinction between culture which is Something that we learn and and race we confuse the two race of course is about genetics Excuse me about phenotype. I'll talk to you about that in a moment, but The main idea that they had in regarding racialism this confusion of race and culture that that's a problem that all of us perpetuate So Ellison made many examples of that. I'll just give you something really brief, which is if you If you raise let's say a black youth in Japan, what do you get? most probably You get a culturally Japanese youth And we need to we need to realize that I think So I'm gonna give you a preview sort of where I'm coming from. I have to face these issues in my own life I've got two children who are born to an Afro-American mother and me who's a virus ancestry And I only speak Spanish with my children So what box do they fit in and the argument that the people in my book made is that far from being Something outside of the norm people like my children are actually The norm in American society in many ways that it's been racial mythologies That's why we say that race is socially constructed, right that the line between black and white or between groups is always arbitrary It's a socially constructed line So central to my book is an effort to engage in this critique of the notion of race and to think of Alternatives at the same time is that I'm very historically grounded in an aware of a history of racial oppression Now as far as the way that social scientists think about race nowadays the American Association for the Advancement of Science has written That race has no biological justification Justification This goes way back. There was a German scientist named Johan Herter in 1785 They said that race was a useless category because colors bleed into each other The American Anthropological Association is called for the elimination of racial categories by 2010 and I'm not necessarily endorsing that or saying that we're ready. I'm just trying to give you a sense of what debate is about Yet a lot of us even in the academic circles go on acting as if the color of our skin or our phenotype That's our outward experiences appearances Influences the way that we interpret or the way that we participate in culture So what I'm going to do tonight is let you hear from the figures in my book and let them voice their own critique of racialism And then to voice their alternative to that Now Marley viewed racialism as a sort of mental slavery, which we'll talk about in a moment Douglas if we could have him on the screen here called racialism a diseased imagination and He said that if it couldn't if this metaphor is a disease the diseases have their periods of Relative remission and their periods of contagion and that of racism and racialism couldn't be cured It could at least be contained in his view by presenting a more attractive alternative So that's what Douglas was about is balancing those two things the critique of the thing that he was against in the articulation of an alternative and that's also what I'll be involved in tonight So this is very contested turf as I'm sure all of you know People get in very heated arguments about it And I think that the debates from my experience about race nowadays has often been polarized in public sphere debates In a way in such that those who insist insist that racialism should be resisted without regard to color will be beat over the head with something called history and accused of being Naive if not reactionary Now this context which I've been involved in over many many years is impressed upon me the importance of a truly historicized identity politics The need to move beyond action reaction cycles And towards the synthesis towards a re-envisioning of his story as our story So let me tell you just a little bit about my own story which is where this starts and how I got into this I was a journalist and a songwriter in Austin, Texas during the 1980s and I used to write journalism primarily about Afro-American and Latino forms of theater and music so sometimes my audience would ask me well What gives you the right to criticize our culture? So this is a part of the process that set me thinking about why was it that in some ways I thought of it is Is our culture was I a cultural imperialist or what was my place in this culture the place was contested? So I had to think about it at the same time one of the reasons that I thought of it is our culture was I was a songwriter for a Dance band a funk and reggae band in Austin, Texas and the band was really mixed We had a lead singer who is Afro-American We had a backup singer who was Filipina our bass player was from Argentina a Latino And we had a bass player who is a drummer from south a Jewish drummer from South Africa So the audience looked pretty much like us in other words. We were really mixed But at the same time we were playing styles of music that were accustomed to think of as black So this is just another example of some of what I've been going through my life that made me think about What does it mean to place culture within a racial box? It forced me to ask myself. What does it mean to be a part of and to claim to speak to a Multiracial community or which I would say more accurately would be multi ethnic or multicultural So this is why I went into the process one of the reasons I went into the process of writing this book is that I knew Then in the process of being in this world and claiming to speak to it and with it that I needed to be historically grounded So I went searching for the roots of the cultures that I was engaged in as a songwriter and as a journalist and as a human being Let me just start you off with Douglas with a little story About what I am doing with him I went to hear Bettina Apthek or the other night at Cody's and she was talking about Angela Davis and Angela of course got fired by the regions of UCLA back in I think it was 1969 and when she went back to Teach that fall after having been reinstated. She had two thousand students show up for her first lecture And guess what she was teaching about This gentleman right here Frederick Douglass So I'd really love to know What Angela Davis was taughting was teaching about Frederick Douglass Which Frederick Douglass did she focus on and a part of whose history and whose culture I Give a lot of different voices people still debate about Frederick Douglass to this day rappers quote him Supreme Court justices quote him Political theorists quote him for various reasons both with and against his legacy He's still a contested figure, but I'm gonna start you with a quote by a political theorist named Michael Linde who wrote that Frederick Douglass was the greatest American in his view and He argued that if we're gonna have monuments to our slave-holding fathers in Washington, DC That Frederick Douglass ought to have a money at the same size as they did that He was that important in our history and I agree I'll try to give you a very brief glimpse of that. This is a man who lived from 1818 to 1895 He's an escaped slave an abolitionist orator a journalist a women's rights man an advisor to presidents a diplomat in the Caribbean His life spans almost the entire 19th century so what I want to do is Starts you with a clip that shows Frederick Douglass as a young man This is him of about age 28 and issues of authenticity And what what's happened is that this is a man who never had one day of schooling in his life Not a single one Yet There's many people who believe he was the greatest orator of the 19th century He went on to become what is the modern-day equivalent of a pop star and a sex symbol Aside from being you know a great speaker and an orator. He had a large impact on the popular culture of his day So when this process started is a young man recently out of slavery This caused problems with the notions of authenticity. I find that this debate is still relevant today i.e. What are our notions of authenticity? particularly with regards to black culture so I'm going to show you a video clip that has a Recreation of Douglass speaking about this notion of authenticity if we can cut the slide Let us have the facts said the people we will take care of the philosophy Be yourself and tell your story Better to have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not It's not best. You seem to learn it. I Could not always obey if I was now reading and thinking it did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs I felt like denouncing them I was growing and needed room so I have taught at contra costa college as well as you know elite universities like cal and I find that my still My students are still struggling with the same issue today douglas had A sponsorship as it were with William Lloyd garrison in a mainstream group of Abolitionists who are mostly white most of european descent they wanted him to sound like an authentic black man And he was a slave an escaped slave So what would an escaped slave sound like? and he spoke broken english right and They needed douglas to be their figurehead to popularize the anti slavery cause and if it became Felt that douglas was not really a former slave and that destroyed his credibility So his authenticity Is any slavery spokesperson? Was really closely tied to his authenticity as a slave and people have preconceived notions of what that culture sounded like douglas said i'm gonna i'm gonna be as eloquent as i can i'm gonna speak like an educated man And that's what he did he wasn't gonna put let anyone put racial boxes on him So the thing that his uh protect his advisors feared in fact happened that nobody believed he had ever been a slave And that's why he wrote his autobiography and had to escape to england i'm gonna give you just a really brief glimpse of how douglas saw himself Because when i am talking about people who speak to a mixed public And who view themselves as part of more than one public Then i don't want you to think that i'm making this up So i'm gonna give you a couple of examples There's a picture in the book of frederick douglas Is about a 60 year old When he had become a national icon he's on the cover of harper's weeklies here And he's a political and pointy of the republicans hard to believe it now, but they were the anti slavery group in douglas's day So people are coming to paint his picture to sculpt him and this kind of thing And a man came to paint frederick douglas's picture And wanted to get the black side of frederick douglas Which a lot of people did So douglas always uses these encounters to challenge people's preconceptions He gave a speech in which he described this encounter. He said a painter was painting me today And insisted on showing my full face For that is ethiopian Which is what they called black people in those days Douglas said take my side face for that is Caucasian Though should you try my quarter face you would find an Indian I don't know that any race can claim me but being identified with slaves as I am I think that I know the meaning of the inquiry So I think you can hear the distinction between a public personality and a private identity that publicly douglas is a Representative of in a freedom fighter for the rights primarily the black americans Privately he sees himself as all the above. He used this oftentimes with humor As I said he challenged people's preconceptions wherever he went And he used his own mixed background to do that. He was on a ferry once in 1848 On the way to an abolitionist convention in cleveland's and he ran into a slave holder This is a passage that douglas Talks about in his autobiography. So this is where I'm quoting him from And the slave holder said that he didn't want to talk to a nigger Douglas said well, I'll tell you what if it makes you feel any better. You could talk to the half of me this white So these are preconceptions that douglas tried to deal with all the time I'm going to have to be brief because I know our time is limited tonight Uh, I had a clip that I was going to show you of douglas in great britain But i'm going to just tell you briefly that Some of douglas's greatest support networks were european And this is a paradox. I want to talk about briefly That we'll see later with marley Here's a freedom fighter in the cause of black liberation whose primary support networks Are quote white people people of european descent So douglas writes this out about about a biography. He goes to england. He becomes a very big celebrity there. His Book is translated into german and dutch and french lords and ladies are courting him poor people also come to see him White women in particular really identified with project douglas. He's a women's rights man from day one And they hear his discourse on freedom and identify with that So a lot of the white feminist in great britain raised money for douglas and they buy his freedom And they buy His printing press So douglas goes back to the us sets up shop in rochester new york It founds the north star Which is generally thought of as the first black national newspaper in the u.s Now it just happens that 80 percent of his readers were people of european descent Uh, the first reaction we might have was maybe they're the only ones that could afford it, but it's not actually that simple William Lloyd garrison had a paper called the liberator. He was the first well known abolitionist and his readers were mostly black In fact, he was underwritten by blacks sailmaker In philadelphia named james forton So basically what we see here is some scholars have argued is two wings of the abolitionist movement a black wing And a white wing that overlap and douglas is at that overlapping place And eventually over time that side of overlapping becomes a movement in its own right and douglas becomes the voice of this multiracial abolitionism I want to give you one more glimpse of where douglas was coming from And then move on Douglas caused a lot of controversy later in his life because his first wife with whom he had five children died He remarried a white woman a feminist One of his descendants one of douglas's descendants said that this is all some of his people remembered about him Which raises the question of who douglas thought his people were Because I argue uh at great length in the book quoting douglas at every turn that he didn't see his people in racial terms But uh as I said to begin the speech tonight douglas moved his critique to a larger level He began fighting slavery and white supremacy But he realized that the roots of this problem was racialism the confusion of people's appearance And their consciousness or their mentality or their intelligence or their culture So he begins to fight racialism in all its forms This includes a critique of people of all colors, which also caused a lot of controversy Uh toward the end of his life douglas extended this critique in particular to many of his many black americans Who douglas felt were perpetuating the same racialism that he had criticized earlier in white people So i'm going to give you a really brief example of that and give you an example of how these issues still live with us today Uh douglas was giving a speech towards the end of his life and um had this to say About racialism among black americans. He said I see no benefit to be derived From this everlasting exhortation by speakers and writers among us to the cultivation of race pride I uh on the contrary he said I see it as a positive evil. It is building on a false foundation Besides he asked what is the thing that we are fighting against and what are we fighting for in this country? What what is it? But american race pride an assumption of superiority On the grounds of race and color He uh also at one point said in response to his other afro-americans that uh When we isolated ourselves from people around us and say that we have nothing in common with you Well, the response will be in the same Regards for when the people care for nobody nobody will care for them So I gave this material to a speech to an afro-american studies class at the university of north carolina last fall It's a large class And at the end of the class there was a young woman at the front had funky dreads and kinty cloth Raised her hand and quoted sister soldier to me. I don't know if any of y'all remember sister soldier She was a controversy during the 1992 Presidential campaign I had her music actually before that but the the passage that the woman quoted to me was this It's from a song of sister soldier and it goes If you're great great grandfather great my great great grandmother And your great grandfather robbed from my great grandfather And this goes through the generations all right up till today Then how in the hell do you expect me to trust you? Now I think if I was a good white liberal I probably would have shut up right then I think that was the intended effect was Was several The woman was disappointed that douglas did not identify himself as black She was disappointed that he had criticized black people and she was angry for me as being the messenger of this message So how am I supposed to have a common ground with you under the terms of that history of rape? and robbery and pillage and conquest So I had to tell The woman that you know there's a piece of truth in what you say But there's a whole lot of racial mythology We project the racial mythologies of the president on to the past and that color is what we say The truth of the matter is that frederick douglas challenges those preconceptions in a whole lot of ways He was a free black man from the north Who spent his life speaking to the 90 percent of euro americans that did not own slaves Now you could find these numbers in many records 30 percent of the people of european descent lived in the south And of those 30 percent 30 percent owned slaves Well, what did the other 90 percent think? you see Some of them were active supporters of slavery Some of them were active opponents of slavery And a lot of them were on the fence somewhere. They had a range of attitudes, but they didn't all have a whip in their hand And uh, not all black people were being whipped by the civil war. I think it was around 25 to 30 percent were free in the north So there's the history is not is is uh, is easy is the racial mythology And sometimes when the facts beneath the racial mythology Uh are challenged and that that it makes us feel insecure. I know Racial mythology is blind us in a lot of ways krs one has a very different view of frederick douglas Then they quote I read you earlier by michael lind which is Of frederick douglas is the greatest american. Uh, krs one is a rapper. He's over the hill now but he gave uh Interview and vibe magazine a couple of years ago and which he called frederick douglas a house nigger in a fucking cell out So I talk about this in the book is another example of what racial mythologies are all about I'm gonna run out of my time for marley. I know but I feel like these uh issues are worth talking about So I want to address this briefly What's involved in that claim by krs one that he is willing to dismiss frederick douglas in those strong terms I think that probably a lot of you know where that comes from I mean it comes from malcom, but it comes from a much deeper source than malcom actually But malcom of course had a typology of field niggers and house niggers I will hope you realize that I don't use these terms in my life, but when I quote people I'm not going to change their own language. So that's where I'm coming from So in malcom's typologies blacks are divided between two camps. They're either field niggers or house niggers house niggers love the white man Field niggers hated the white man house niggers sold out to the white man's oppressive system Field niggers resisted that system by any means necessary So in this us versus them binary racial mythology one is not Really black Unless one is unalterably opposed to all things white So this uh, give me a little transition here because uh krs one was actually at a reggae festival I went to this weekend in LA So performing with dance hall stars, which is the contemporary reggae And um, let me uh, just sort of come at this issue about Multiracial movements and authenticity and where do these where do these things fit together through marley in the time I have left Marley is just blown up over the last couple of years His legacy is continue to get bigger and bigger bob bob said a thing back in 1975 Which I find really amazing. He said my music will live forever But I don't even think he had a clue over how true that was going to be So, uh, we've had uh rap remakes of his album called chant down Babylon come out at the last year time magazine named him He named his album exodus the album of the century The british broadcasting corporation named his song one love the song of the century And this stuff just goes on and on it's really an amazing phenomenon that bob's legacy keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger So I'm going to do something really similar with bob marley that I did with frederick douglas and that's Try to talk let him say with his own words a little bit about how he saw himself And what he made of this multi ethnic and multinational audience, which was his core group So the context is is that marley's coming of age in the caribbean In the 1960s when jamaica is getting its independence African countries are undergoing decolonization So it's a militants in marley's music There's uh themes of you know, africa unite, um get up stand up for your rights slave driver Chase these crazy bald heads out of town, which is bob is singing to all white audiences in great britain If you can dig the irony So people are picking up on this militants in the black unity themes and they ask bob are you prejudice against white people? So this is where i'm going to start you with is to play you bob's response to this question You don't have no prejudice about myself because Why me don't have no prejudice about myself my my father's a white and my mother black No, they'll call me half chaos or whatever Well We don't depend on the body side. We don't depend on the black man side. Not a white man side But if i'm god's side the man who created me who caused me to come from black and white I have to um Translate this a lot of times when I teach it to my students. So I'll do that um Because I know that some of you won't understand it bob and the people in the jamaica speaking patois or some of them say patois And it's it's english. It's their own It's their own version of english. It's a really rich language But anyway, what he says is essentially this that uh, I can't be prejudice against myself He says my father was white and my mother black And then call me half cast or whatever And then he says but i'm not on the black man side or the white man side I'm on god's side the one who created me Who caused me to come from black and white? So in the little time I have left I kind of wanted to talk just a little bit about how bob came To that self concept and what bob's sense of community was what bob actually meant when we said rosta I think that the awareness of bob's life and uh Culture beneath the millions who buy his records is probably pretty pretty shallow um Let's see. Bob was referencing a history of Race conflict and that quote now if you study american history You'll know of something very similar to what bob's talking about when he says people call me a half cast And in american history, that's called tragic mulatto And that's this notion that if you are of mixed quote race of mixed heritage Then either society will destroy you Or you will destroy yourself, right? You can find that in novels throughout history and if you think it's still dead today then Go see spiked movies movie jungle fever You'll see a really good example of the tragic mulatto still in action So when bob marley was a youth he got a lot of grief because most of what in jamaica they call brown people Had traditionally tried to associate themself with a white upper class bob went against type Bob grew up with the sufferers the black sufferers and the ghettos of kingston He there's a lot of stories that people tell about him He dated a young woman once in his trench town yard and the older brother of this woman cut off the relationship And said we don't want no white men messing up our bloodlines. So them style him a white man This caused a lot of conflict rita marley says that he was sometimes so confused about not knowing where he fit in this Context that sometimes you want to kill himself i.e. He didn't have a father He was of mixed race. He didn't know where he fit So this is a central aspect of bob marley's life And i argue a central reason why when he eventually gets to the place where he's quoting highly salasses without regards to race philosophy This rings particularly True rings is especially relevant for bob marley Who's trying to find to locate a philosophy in which he can combine these themes of black liberation Black independence but also other aspects of his identity That can be connected to his increasingly multinational audience of bob marley's music is being sold to Market budweiser nowadays So there's this question about like to what degree is bob's music still revolutionary So let me just give you a couple of angles on that The really interesting thing with bob is that he is He's really a very articulate man who is also very aware of context So i'm going to start you with a clip of bob in new zealand claiming to be a revolutionary And then i'm going to go to a clip of bob at ucla here in california Giving a really different angle on what it means to be a revolutionary. So we start with uh bob's claim to be A real revolutionary. This is on this will be in new zealand in 1979 A revolutionaries, you know He and his master was a revolutionary Who don't have no help and now i take no bribe of no one to fight and sing landed with music Okay Now after that, uh, this is on his survival tour How many y'all have the album survival What's on the cover? african flags slave ships, right This album was originally entitled black survival and they turned it They changed it to survival for marketing reasons. Bob went along on it But uh, there's absolutely no question about what the album is about really If you look at the cover and read the lyrics So bob didn't reach much of an afro-american audience during his life In fact, uh afro-american dj's called his music jungle music It wouldn't play it but with survival he's beginning To reach to that demographic. He's playing the apollo in new york and things like that So what i'm going to show you now is a clip of bob talking about what it means to be a revolutionary in a really different way And this is to a group of afro-american grad students and journalists at ucla On the survival tour in 1979 This is a fairly long clip, but i think it's Really important because it uh, it talks about the essence of where bob is coming from In terms of quote racial identity and in terms of having a revolutionary consciousness Uh, i need to set that up though. There's a there's a uh, a grad student at cal The ucla in the black studies department who has asked bob how can you claim to be a revolutionary? When you're a pop star and you're over here in the west, so what you're going to hear is bob's answer to that question Are they doing anything towards revolution? Are they doing anything? Towards revolution i'm asking I didn't have fight revolution. I didn't have a revolution We don't even have to tell people that You know, we don't want to tell no one that I mean So you talk about african struggle You see, you know jamaica You know all jamaica and all black people read jamaica You know, they know all the history of that The history it is to slavery So when you know jamaica and talk about africa When you know jamaica when you know the west and you speak of africa like even maybe even seven years ago It was terrible. You know that You know, I mean you could even talk to you one black man bought africa and tell you not to deal with africa Then i fight for africa man You know, it's majesty. If it wasn't for i last year, there wouldn't be no africa It would have been europe I'm not changing him so much. You wouldn't have no utopia So not at both Revolution I want to tell you every revolution must if they won't win the revolution. They must have won it with raster You can't win other way because if you win other way you have a fight again When raster win, they know more war Cars of war, forget about that If you study the lyrics to the song war you see what his majesty had to say about it And if you can base your life on that philosophy then you become a raster Okay, um, that's jr. Marvin who is the guitarist in bob's band at the time so Couple of key themes here that I want to focus on and one is this debate on like are we a revolutionary or not? And what does it mean to be a rasta? Okay, that's the two things I want to talk to you about for a moment Uh bob is saying that he's been going through this country and in people here didn't even want to talk about africa But now times are changing. He says i'm not even claiming to be a revolutionary Because if you go and fight a revolution with guns Then when you get through he says you're going to have to fight the war all over again But if you win the war with rasta Then there'll be no more war So what he's referencing here is he always does over and over again as highly sulasis 1963 speaks to the united nations which is called what life has taught me on the question of racial prejudice That's uh was put to music word by word in the song war which many of you will have heard And it says in brief uh until the color of a man's Eyes is no more significant than the color of his skin vice versa Until the color of a man's skin is no more important than the color of his eyes That until equal rights are guaranteed to all Without regard to race That there will always be war I think that we can look at history and see what bob is talking about that uh people who are a formally oppressed group And fight a revolutionary war and come to power When they get into power, what do they do? Well, of course they turn around and they oppress someone else and the cycle goes on and on and on So what bob is saying here is that we need a revolution in consciousness And what he called that revolution in consciousness was rasta So at the end of the speech you hear junior marvin his guitar is saying that if you were to put this uh teachings of Without regards to race into practice, then you too can be a rasta So let me just sort of close here with a little bit of discussion about what bob meant when he said rasta And what bob made made of the fact that a lot of his fans were japanese and european and etc So in the book, I uh talk about rasta in these terms that as frederick douglas once said it is just as important to Articulate what you stand for as it is what you stand against, okay So the rastas stood against babelon. That's a metaphor. I'm going to read you a passage from the book This is from an afro-american scholar named jack johnson hill who went down to jamaica and lived with the rastas And he defined their view of babelon the system to which they were opposed in these terms That it was an artificial affluent society of self-absorbed individuals Who worship idols and live decadent lifestyles at the expense of the poor? This sound familiar to any of y'all He's not talking about us. I know Worshiping idols and living decadent lifestyle. That's babelon. So people ask what do you mean by babelon? Is that the white men's system? You said no, it's it's much bigger than that But what they stood for I break down into three main things one was just a uh a sustainable lifestyle This is a very important part of what the rastas are about they're vegetarians And they believe in trotting lightly on the earth essentially The second part was a white excuse me a post white supremacy worldview This is a movement this emerging in opposition to white supremacy Some of them then turn around and articulate a vision of black supremacy But I think the essence of uh where most rastas are coming from is to try to move beyond racialism altogether And the third aspect is eye and eye consciousness Which simply means that you don't project deity out there that you recognize that the spirit dwells within us And that's a very old tradition. Of course, you can read it in the nostics in many other places so um In closing I want to just give you some glimpses of what happened when bob took this message on the road And went to an international audience um People of course continued often to try to Put racial categories on him. So bob was in new york once and he had this to say don't talk to me about black and white We fly a color which is red, gold and green We're not prejudiced. We leave judgment entirely into jaw This is double voice music like bob always has red, gold and green are the colors of african liberation All right But at the same time they are a banner for an international movement Is the guitarist junior marvin said here if you could follow those teachings are The three things I laid out here in my book you too can be a rasta So red, gold and green is the colors of african liberation But it's also the colors of an international cultural movement And bob's saying our movement is about what those colors represent. It's not about black and white bob had to speak to many different parts of his audience One part of that audience was a group of black nationalist Or what we sometimes today call afro-centrist which many rastas are today There's a group in jamaica called the bobos, which are black supremacists They have voices like sisla and uh, anthony b But so bob engaged these folks in debate too and this is the way he voiced it to them He said you must not bounce to the white man. You must be superior to him That means you cannot be prejudiced Because if you are superior Then how can you be prejudiced? So he's taken that thought process to his logical conclusion He also is often asked about what he makes the fact that he's a quote a black man Who's primarily followers are white And this is once again the way that bob tried to re-articulate this in a new way bob said it is god who make everybody And him make a way for the black man that the white man have to follow Because out of the black man come the white man all men I hope that you all can read women into this, you know, that's one of the problems that we have with the rastas None of our models are perfect But what he's doing here is he's talking about africa is the origin of all human beings, right? Which most scientists today will affirm that we came out of africa So if africa was the mother of all races And if the forerunners of the human race did indeed first appear in ethiopia, then all races Were related black and white people were cousins And even europeans were ethiopians in an ancestral sense Let me try to talk to you for a moment about bob's legacy and then we'll open this up to questions There's a Jamaican anthropologist named bary shivanis Who says that bob marley's decision His process of going out touring globally Was the rasta equivalent Of paul's decision to speak to the gentiles Now can you follow me on that one? Now when you're talking about paul going to speak to the gentiles you're talking about what was once a jewish Religion right Being translated to a global audience which they call gentiles anything non-jewish in those days was gentiles So for this started much earlier when the jews were carried away from babelan this song you'll hear in rasta culture as well as like Frederick Douglass's speech by the rivers of babelan there i sat down at weps Well when the jews were carried away to babelan they had to begin the process of thinking They're not there in jerusalem where they can do their rituals anymore and they have to think is this a jewish god? Or is it a house of prayer for all people? So when paul goes and speaks to the gentiles then you can see that pop process of translation going on that they're Rearticulating a notion of a house of prayer for all people when bob marley and the rastas go international They have to think about this same process And they have to ask themselves is this a black god? Or is it is this a god of all people that we're talking about and it's a journey It's not a complete journey But the essence of the journey in my view really can be found in many reggae songs that talk about one blood And that's a quote from acts 1726 says of one blood god has created all nations that dwell upon the face of the earth So when you hear bob marley's most famous song one love then that's what he's talking about one love one heart Y'all remember the lines of the song Is there a place for the hopeless sinner Who has hurt all mankind? Just to save his own So the answer is in the chorus and it depends on how you do how you want to interpret the chorus I'm not going to tell you what I think the right interpretation is because bob's music speaks in many different ways to many different people Neville garrick was a jamaican art designer who studied under angela davis at ucla and then went on to do lights for bob Has described bob's music as new songs Which I find really evocative Maybe because I grew up in the church, you know I only actually started looking up my bible again because I went to jamaica and heard the rostus quoting it, okay And it made me look at my own roots in a new way But songs are things that you quote at every opportunity you put them to music you recycle them, right So this is exactly what we see with bob marley's music today is that uh, if you think about his lyrics in those terms Why they have had such an amazing musical afterlife They're like they're like songs. They're like lyrics that are quoted often by the faithful Um, we're about out of time here. So, uh, I want to just give you one sense of what I mean by Talking about douglas and marley as integrative ancestors. This is one of the Main themes of the book in the beginning of the book. I say if iconic figures such as douglas Ellison and marley were presented in our school books and in the popular imagination As integrative ancestors who could be claimed by more than one ethno racial group Well, would this help us to build a democracy in which commonality and difference could go coexist This is coming out of my experience of having these people put in racial boxes So what I did when selah my little youth over here This is selah I wrote this book for her. I dedicated it to her when she was a little bit of youth We used to go dance to bob marley tunes. I spent a momentito selah And I and I had life-sized pictures of frederick douglas and bob marley on the walls Because I wanted selah to grow up surrounded by images of people who look like her And images of people and what she could see that both her mom And her dad Had a heritage So we'd go in and say good night to them at night and she'd say buenas noches abuelo frederick. Good night granddad frederick and buenas noches to bob So she started eventually getting a real interest in slavery We I discussed this in the book, but in any way she started making up stories About frederick douglas and bob marley. So eventually she started asking me Dad is this story I made up in this book here. She thought that came from somewhere else And then she wanted to know dad. Are you going to put my story in your book? And I said well Yes, selah I will Because I thought it actually illustrates what I'm talking about When I say what an integrated ancestor is. So selah kid is uh larprimido and espanol is this nice and nice? So in glace as the face, okay Okay, so tell him your story You can tell me what's when you want first the english or spanish espanol Okay, uh, my whole English My english Once about time once about time uh, bob marley and frederick douglas were walking in the world And frederick douglas turned into a star and bob marley turned into a lion A ghost attack by bob marley saved them and they keep walking Okay Oh, and espanol, okay Can I see this oh Okay Yeah, I'm not sure where all that came about whoops. I'm sorry I'll talk about this in the book but anyway That's the notion that these folks are rooted in a history But they are speaking to audiences of the future and we don't know how audiences of the future are going to interpret their message And that's kind of what i'm getting at with selah story or that uh frederick douglas and bob marley are walking down the road and frederick douglas converts into a star That's the north star, right? Bob marley converts into a lion while the lion is the lion of judo. That's the rostus icon So, um, we don't know how audiences of the future what they will make of this legacy So out of the mouth of babes, right? Come some amazing things. I want to just think for just a moment about Moving towards the future and and what it takes to create community And citizenship in which our commonalities and difference can coexist. I have a quote from uh noam chomsky that I always really liked And noam chomsky says that social action must be animated by a vision of a future society Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society As we are engaging in social action Do we have a vision of a future that animates the way that we think and talk and act? um And I wrote a la times piece about Marley a couple of weeks ago and which I said that I think this is This is what I get out of this legacy of douglas and of marley That the exodus away from racialism That marley advocated does not mean to forget the race the history Of racial oppression. It means to avoid repeating the pattern And to avoid repeating the pattern racialism requires a new language and a new consciousness As I say in my book a new culture That doesn't mean that it's going to be a utopian process That doesn't mean we're all going to actually get along all of a sudden it's not going to work that way Ralph ellison sayla Ralph ellison uh talked about the historical process of interaction between black and white people in this country Is a form of antagonistic cooperation Which I found really evocative That uh, it's it's not been all good and it's not been all bad. There's been a lot of conflict But if you think of this metaphor of antagonistic cooperation Whether you focus on the antagonism Or on the cooperation The end result is still co-creation For which all of us can claim Responsibility For which all of us can claim responsibility For which all of us must claim responsibility. I appreciate your time and i'm gonna open the floor for you all now. Thank you very much I'm uh, if anybody has comments or questions. I'm supposed to ask you to wait until a microphone comes your way Yes, sir. I have a number of different comments to make but also in the context of uh A critical interrogation of some of what you've raised here Um, I think it's it's clear first of all with with any common-sensical understanding of american history over the past two to three centuries that americans Generally speaking share A quote-unquote common heritage With that understanding, however, there is a larger and a broader context that needs to be addressed Seriously without egregiously Engaging in what I call backdoor reductionism For example, it's clear to me that it's reductive to claim that People who are concerned about The relationship between race as a social construct And racism as an ideological and political economic And cultural form of oppression and exploitation Are people who are interested in a in a very complex very conflicted understanding of american history in other words The individual from university of north carolina who raised I think An important question whether we agree with the context of the question or not or whether we even agree with what we perceive Rightly or wrongly as the implications of the question Needs to be addressed in a serious way because while race of course is a myth racism isn't And because of the prevalence and the predominance Of racial thinking in the united states from the standpoint of ideology and political and economic systems Is important and I think all three of these individuals um Represent that understanding that complex conflicted understanding that is not reductive that while on the one hand we have to address the the question of the uh Manipulative aspects of race as a social construct We also at the same time have to deal with the implications of dealing with racism as a Incredibly destructive notion of what american citizenship is So that when we look at metaphor in in terms of language malcolm x was speaking in metaphorical terms highly symbolic terms With an incredibly complex understanding of american history when he raised the question of house niggers and field niggers. He wasn't merely Engaging in binary um Philosophizing shall we say when he raised those particular categories? It's necessary for us to deal with the fact that when people speak in in in metaphorical terms that they are trying to Include a much broader context for our understanding of what reality is than that which we have been all taught So so therefore I don't I don't see any Conflict whatsoever when we started talking about american citizenship, but there is a highly contested highly conflicted highly complex War that persists when we start talking about it in terms of racism Which is a force that is Much more concrete Much more real and has much more serious Reprecussions for all of us than a mere academic discussion of race as a social construct now it's Almost impossible for me in this very limited time to go into all the ramifications of that But just from the standpoint of logic It seems to me that that is important not to engage in an an egregious Reductionism when we begin to deal with the question of race As social construct vis-a-vis racism as an ideological and political economic cultural force and until we do that and in some In my view much more sophisticated and and in much more complex terms. We're not going to seriously address the question of Identity quote-unquote and we're certainly not going to deal deal in a serious way with the question of how do we Quote-unquote resolve these kinds of issues while this political and economic system As presently constituted and as and as historically constituted it's still intact And until we can look at the relationship between individual transformation and social transformation as coexisting Then we're not going to seriously address the question of commonality and difference because those remain abstractions abstractions binary oppositions as long as we don't deal with the fact that as the late clr james put it One cannot merely change and one hit and one's head that which can only be changed in society My second and last point and then I'll shut up Is the question Because there's a lot to deal with here and it's impossible to deal with it in any kind of Realistic way without bringing in all of this stuff. So bear with me The last part of it is the overwhelming majority of african americans historically Are for And our fierce advocates of multi-racialism That goes for everybody from idb wells calling hobkins William Monroe trotter not to mention wb the boys Martin Luther king Malcolm x america rocker ishmael reed connie morrison On and on and on and on that's not the problem. The problem is There is fierce structural systemic institutional opposition to african americans advocating Multi-racialism in the united states and we all know that old story. I don't have to go over that again But we can't merely address that and and and purely abstract academic intellectual terms that has to be dealt with at the level of society and economy and all of that But it's It's highly offensive to me to for someone to suggest At this late day that african americans in general do not support the kinds of positions advocated by federal douglas bob marley and ralph ellison in point of fact The the the major figures in american history of the past 250 to 300 years have all been quote unquote african americans from a philip randoff To all of of federal douglas contemporaries We can talk about sejourner truth. We can talk about harried tubman. We can talk about pauling hopkins We can talk about francis harper Right, we can talk about all all of the people who are affiliated with a philip randoff and dr. Martin Luther king and paul robison in this century Unfortunately, however, every single one of those individuals as we well know Have been lynched assassinated attacked misrepresented ridiculed beaten burned Tard and feather that too Is american history and that too has to be accounted for we can't merely Discuss it and and purely abstract terms and then try to try to divorce our understanding of that history with relationship To what you so eloquently have said here today And so it seems to me that that we need to take seriously that much larger broader and yes multi racial multinational and global perspective because if we don't We will wind up trying to change in our heads that which can only be changed in society Yeah, I would respond really briefly Uh on on the first of what I hear is two main points I don't really have any disagreement with you and if you were to read my book you'd see that The the the term that people use nowadays to talk about systemic equal inequalities The the term that is used to deal with the fact that yes race is a fiction but racism is not Is racial formations And that's the notion that We are racialized and that racialized attitudes are perpetuated through our institutions through economic systems Through a wide variety of notions So I talk about this great length in the book and that's A core part of what i'm doing is dealing with the reality of racial formations At the same time I say if we want to talk about the historical reality and the continuing endurance of racial formations Let's talk about multiracial formations. I don't think one needs to be done to the exclusion of the other I balanced those two essentially in the book I do think that racial mythology is a blindness to What ralph ellison called the true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness Now as to why these institutional sanctions of racial formations are so pervasive I'd have to disagree with you And leave it at that that we can agree to disagree In in fact, uh, there's been a uh movement during the 1990s for a Multicultural multi-ethnic or a multiracial category and the fiercest opposition of that to that has come from afro-americans That's a really huge phenomenon that I deal with as I can in the book, but it's as you said another book Well, I have to we all just have to disagree Well, you can I'm sure there's Okay All right. Well, we we disagree on that one. There's documentation probably for both of our views Let's uh, we had a question right over here. I was just gonna We're taping this for oh Well, I don't want to say what I was going to say No, I just I just was going to make comment that I think what the whole subject deals with Is that the truth and justice is Not in any of the categories Truth and justice is where we find it in truth and justice is just out there and when I talk about You know like gay or straight or male or female masculinity feminism We find people thinking that the truth is You know like a like a gay male might think okay, my truth is the only truth and I will trust another gay male Just because he's gay or a woman will say Well, I'll trust that woman because she's a woman And the truth is just Somewhere else the truth is the truth is in our hearts In our truth and our justice is to be found where it is Not in the categories not in the colors not in What cars we drive not in the clothes we wear That's all the time that I wanted to make well the main point I really try to make with my book is that truth and rights Is a culture in a movement that's multi racial multi gendered and I draw inspiration from that So if we want to think about how do we change these racial formations or other Patterns of exclusion. I believe it requires coalitions And to build a coalition one needs language one needs new consciousness. Yes Wait till the to the mic gets there Okay, the question that I have is In um Frederick Douglass's book he mentions an Austin Gore And if he traces lineage to this day to this present day in our new culture He has relationship with our vice president Gore Okay So I led to believe that this is not this is still not a democracy, but it is a handed down government from one family And that there are no racial motivations just like When I was growing up I would go to my grandmother's house for Sunday dinner And then I'd come back here And go to my friend's house for Sunday. It'd be completely different. So we brought up to live To believe like they believe and they're the way that that one house is run Governing a whole place That makes sense and another comment that or another question that I have is how do you communicate that to somebody? How would you sit there and say it has nothing to do with race? It has nothing to do It has to do with a fraud You know school about teaching us that this is a democracy and that we all have the right to vote on something or another I talk about that a great link. They analyze a speech of Frederick Douglass is called what to the slave is the fourth of july Frederick Douglass got in front in front of a group of people in rochester and new york and said what to the slave Is the fourth of july in other words, he's criticizing the hypocrisy Of a slave holding republic holding celebrations of freedom So, uh, I feel this is getting to your question What he does after the first half of his speech of he calls, uh, america the most hypocritical nation in the world but then he Looks for a new foundation on which to build and he's unwilling to throw out the baby with the bath water So he says one blood strictly one blood I deal with is the rostus would say he quotes this passage about one blood Where does the new consciousness come from this capable of going beyond the hypocrisy? That's one side. He believes in one blood. The other side is he says, uh, we are the true revolutionaries I believe in those ideals the founding fathers said This is what Douglass says. Yeah, they were hypocrites, but do you have a better ideal? He said we The abolitionists are the true revolutionaries because we're putting those ideals into practice So everybody has to find their own answer for that. That's what I found in the book is that uh, the ideals are not bad if the enactment and if uh, if you have a better ideal then Then uh, one blood in equal rights, then I'd like to hear it I let I know we're short on time. So let's go to like one or two more questions If anybody has some Very much Gregory and you'll have a little time to talk with him afterwards outside in the lobby I don't know what his schedule is but His book is available here through the library and thank you all for coming and showers of blessings on everybody