I think that most people don't think in terms of an American revolution, they think in terms of a Russian revolution, or even a Ukrainian revolution. But the idea of an American revolution does not occur to most people. And when I came down to the movement milieu seventy-five years ago, the black movement was just starting, and the war in Europe had brought into being the "Double V for Victory" [campaign]: the idea was that we ought to win democracy abroad with democracy at home. And that was the beginning of an American revolution, and most people don't recognize that.

I think we have to rethink the concept of “leader.” 'Cause “leader” implies “follower.” And, so many- not so many, but I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.

Some people are afraid of gentrification, but what I see is young people want to live in a different world. And they see possibilities here. They see that rents are relatively cheap compared to places like New York and California.

Actually, if you go back to what Marx said in The Communist Manifesto over a hundred years ago, when in talking about the constant revolutions in technology, he ended that paragraph by saying, "All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air, and men and women are forced to face with sober senses our conditions of life and our relations with our kind." We're at that sort of turning point in human history.

It's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking.

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

The Vietnam War was taking place, which was raising all sorts of questions in the United States, and it was forcing Asian-Americans to stop thinking of themselves as model minorities and to identify themselves more with world revolution, which was very important in my development.