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11.3. Interview with Radical Activist Pat Sumi, 1971.
Source: Editorial Board, “An Interview with Pat Sumi,” Roots: An Asian American Reader, eds., Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, Buck Wong (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1971), pp. 253–264.
Courtesy of the UCLA AASC Press. Please contact the Press for further use requests.
EDITORIAL BOARD JULY, 1971
AN INTERVIEW WITH PAT SUMI
QUESTION: Could you elaborate a little bit on your personal background, and how you evolved into becoming a radical?
SUMI: It seems to me that becoming a radical is only a logical conclusion to the resolution of contradictions not only in your own life but between you and society; if you keep pushing yourself to find answers to problems you see, you wind up having a radical perspective.
In high school, I was the model Asian. I got good grades and ran for student body offices and had good citizenship marks. I grew up in a mostly white, upper middle class neighborhood. There were some Chinese families around but it wasn’t like the Westside or the most nitty-grit of J-flats. I had a very narrow conception of life; I was into getting good grades at school. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with it afterwards. But then I went to Occidental College, a predominantly Christian, Caucasian college, and most of the people came from South Pasadena. And just because it was that kind of thing, it raised those contradictions in my life.I had to ask myself, was I white? Was I middle class? Was I Japanese, was I not Japanese? What was I? For the four years I was in college, I went through a series of experiences that really sharpened those questions.
I went to Japan between my freshman and sophomore years and visited and traveled around not only to see the sights, but also to see relatives—farmers—the kind of middle peasant types in Japan. It was kind of a mind-blower because I felt as if I had gone home. I was surprised. I hadn’t any idea that I was really Japanese in that sense. I’m more so, I think, than most Sansei, because I lived with my grandparents all my life. But still, it was a very surprising experience. I came back and re-entered this white world and I began to resent things like people saying, “Wow, do Japanese really eat raw fish?” Another thing about racism towards Black people. At that time, I considered it a separate thing from racism toward Asian people. I didn’t even know if it was racism toward Asian people, because certainly what was happening to Black people seemed to be different.That crystalized when I went to Africa in 1965; I went with a kind of missionary attitude toward primitive Black people, but I discovered that they had many things in common with my relatives in Japan. They were not very wealthy farmers. They had a rich, traditional family structure—a lot of traditional folk material. They came from what I consider a very rich cultural heritage. Immediately, that meant that you could not explain the conditions of Black people in America by saying that they came from a more primitive type of society than Japanese. That’s one of the arguments used about how we’re assimilated and supposedly Black people aren’t—because we come from such a rich tradition and a high civilization and Black people don’t. I discovered that it just wasn’t true.So I came back and the next summer, after I graduated from college—I got a B.A. in history, which doesn’t really mean much—I went to the South. I decided that if Black people were separate, it must be because of segregation. Of course, the “answer” was to integrate. And I found for the first time in my life that someone wanted to kill me because of my beliefs. We walked around in this demonstration with almost two hundred crazy rednecks; a lot of them very young people in their twenties who literally wouldn’t mind—as they were throwing bricks and things at us—if they accidently bashed your head in. It’s kind of a scary thing, to say the least. It was my first experience of the police being on the other side, not protecting the interest of poor people, but interested in protecting the privileged people.I couldn’t understand it. Those white people weren’t privileged either; they were privileged because they were white, but they certainly weren’t privileged economically—they lived in shacks just like Black people. The plantation owners didn’t even bother to come to those demonstrations; they just sat up in their air-conditioned plantation houses. It was very confusing.
I worked there at that time in an O.E.O. (Office of Economic Opportunity) program called Child Development Group of Mississippi in the Health Department. We came up with some pretty astonishing figures—80 percent of one county’s Head Start Children were anemic; anywhere from 10–40 percent so anemic, that if they were white middle class children, they would be hospitalized. We also had the experience of having a two and one-half year old child in the program die from complications from malnutrition. He died from diarrhea and just didn’t have strength to deal with it.I was just amazed at the so-called democratic system that could not respond to the needs of starving people. Now I know that there are other people in the Northern cities who starve, including our own Asian people. To be told that it wasn’t politically expedient to raise the issue of starvation really blew my mind. It didn’t seem to me that democracy had anything left to offer. I now know that this is bourgeois democracy, where the rich people really have the control. The real needs of people outside have no meaning to them. After this I went back to graduate school. That was my second year of graduate school (Cornell), and I was determined to find some answers. It was fruitless to pursue it. The other students and professors weren’t even interested in that field. They were interested in their degrees and dissertations, classes, and full-time teaching status. It was a drag. I just packed up my books, my two cats, and all my belongings and came West. I just said, “Later, I just can’t deal with this at all.”
I wound up in a hippie commune—now that I look back on it, a comical commune—of people in Palo Alto, which had been one of the founding forces of the draft resistance movement in early ’67. It had all the problems of a hippie commune: it was male chauvinist, elitist, racist … but again, in that context, it was a step forward for me. By then I had decided that the war in Vietnam was wrong. Again, I didn’t know exactly why. There’s something very great to be said about courage that the young have today. We may not know exactly where this is going to lead us. It may lead us to six feet under the ground or to jail, but insofar as we have a life that has to be dedicated to something, we will and should dedicate that life to making this wrong right, however we can do it. It seemed to me at that time that the best way to stop the war was to keep people from joining the army. I did not realize at the time that white middle class people could afford to go to jail, could afford the psychological burden of resisting the draft in an individualistic moral stand—whereas lower class and third world people could not afford that, and that a lot of minorities had been to jail and didn’t want to go again.I thought everyone was just like me—educated and middle class.I lived in that commune a little more than a year. In that time, significant things happened to me. I worked in a minority education program at a junior college, the College of San Mateo—that’s where I met Warren Furutani.
Warren wanted to front me off as an Asian counselor because I had a college degree and a Japanese name. I didn’t want to ask him then, but I couldn’t understand “why an Asian counselor?” Asians don’t need counselors, I thought—we’ve all got it made. The cat was so earnest and enthusiastic about an Asian counselor and minority program—so I kind of just said “Yeah, sure”, not at all realizing what I got myself into. Also, at the same time, I got into my first attempt to organize G.I.’s. My job was to organize the leafleting team to go out and leaflet all the bases and bus stations and airports about a G.I. peace march in San Francisco. We found that G.I.’s were very willing and receptive—well, not all of them; some were very hostile, mostly career and officer types. You cannot go on government reservations; it’s not for people. You cannot hand out literature unless it’s been approved by the commanding officer. I was detained on two bases; Hamilton Air Force Base and finally arrested at Treasure Island Naval Base, San Francisco Bay. Also, at that point, I suddenly found myself being one of the eleven demands being put forth by the minority students at San Mateo and being hired as a counselor. So I went to work there for little less than two months, and was finally ushered out the door by the administration.
I found out that it doesn’t really matter if you’re quiet and non-violent, and petitioned peacefully and discussed things in a reasonable way with people, because as long as they had the power, you could be as reasonable as you wanted to, but they weren’t going to give you control over anything that really affected your life—especially not minority students. By then, I began to realize why Asians had to be included—because there were a whole lot of poor Asians I had never known about who were trying to struggle through this crazy program and who were getting arrested and so on. I found out what institutional racism looked like, just glaring us in the face. Unless you have the power to control that institution, you just have no way to change that institution. I just decided that I was tired of the hippie commune.I just couldn’t relate to that racism, the bullshit, anymore. So we decided to start a G.I. coffeehouse at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California. That’s where I consider I really began to become a radical organizer, as opposed to a sympathizer or “misguided youth,”—because at that point, I came into direct conflict with the powers that control this country.
When you organize in the military, you organize directly counter to American foreign policy because American troops are the rifle point of that policy. When you start messing with the troops, you’re messing with the power that the man has to control most of the so-called “free world.” Again, I think that if I really knew what I was getting into, I don’t think I would have had the nerve to do it. But it’s precisely because you felt not only you had to do it, but that—like the American Indians have a saying, “It’s a good day to die”—you just think that this is something that’s worth dying for, whether you fully understand all the political reasoning or not. You go with that faith, that the world can be made better by human effort and it has to be … even if it means human sacrifice. It was a phenomenal response from the G.I.’s. We sort of forced the military to go through everything from liberalism to absolute fascism in about six months! The brass were just terrified … about the organization, Movement for Democratic Military. We just began out of the faith that the G.I.’s should be self-determined people too—that they were oppressed, that they could educate themselves, politically educate others, write newspapers, and organize themselves to deal with their oppression. The problem was the issues weren’t clearly defined at all. Often, we just confused the issues and a lot of people’s minds down there. But we did a whole lot of things right. We succeeded in having a couple of really great demonstrations—one in which a thousand G.I.’s turned out.
QUESTION: What happened to them?
SUMI: Well, M.D.M. still exists in the minds of people—but that’s not an organization, we discovered. We discovered what the Black Panthers have since discovered—that mass sympathy does not at all mean mass organization. Mass sympathy does not give you the power to change anything. We didn’t understand what an organization was.
We really messed up some G.I.’s. A lot of them went to jail. Some had to go A.W.O.L. A few went to Canada. We had no way really to organize power to protect G.I.’s when they were arrested or harassed. Finally, the thing that really broke us was in April of 1970, last year. Someone fired 12 rounds into the M.D.M. house and nearly killed a G.I. That was when we discovered we had no organizational way to respond. That was it. That was the crisis. That was when the pigs decided to confront us. That was when we discovered we had no real power. After that, it was downhill for the organization. I didn’t understand all this. Last summer, I was running around in Asia telling everyone about M.D.M. when, in fact, it was really falling to pieces. I came home and there was no M.D.M. left. But it was for the really impressive G.I. work that we did do that I was chosen to go as a representative of the G.I. movement in the delegation to Asia. And again, naively, I went trotting off to see Asia, not knowing what I was getting into.
QUESTION: You talked about the people’s delegation before. Do you have any further thoughts on it?
SUMI: I discovered that in relating to international revolutionary movements, you have to represent something. For most of us, except for the Panthers—and even now for the Panthers, it is a question of who do they really represent—you shouldn’t get a bunch of individuals to go. It’s not useful. I suppose what it did do was to heighten my consciousness of the real critical need in the American movement for a party; some kind of guiding force that can take leadership in struggle.
We don’t have it yet. Everyone is floundering around, trying to find direction on their own. I suspect this period of pre-party struggle will last a great deal longer; in fact, too long. I think we’re going to find that we’ll have to have a party, because a whole lot of us are going to wind up in jail. There’s a good possibility in the next two, three, four years that there’s going to be a massive repression. I don’t think it’ll kill a whole lot of us—but it will put a whole lot of us away. People are going to understand what we understood when the pigs decide to confront us, that if you don’t have the organizational power to meet that crisis, then comes the question—“Can you make it, can you make an organization? Will you have that power?”
QUESTION: Is that when you started getting involved in the Asian Movement? A lot of people see you in different roles—as an organizer, as a movement, as a P.R. person. How do you see yourself?
SUMI: At this point, right now, it’s not clear to me what I have to do. I think the political development in Los Angeles has come to a certain point which is an important construction point. The question is of my role in that. I don’t know if I have a role here or elsewhere, geographically speaking, in the Asian movement.
QUESTION: In terms of the need for organization, how do you see that happening in the Asian community? Is that organization to be on an ethnic basis?
SUMI: Leadership is the critical question in a revolution. Leadership that the masses of people can relate to and trust. If you don’t have that leadership then the masses of people are just not going to automatically rise up. There is a kind of belief among one whole line in the Asian movement, which I call the Social Services line—that if you merely present the people with contradictions, e.g., welfare not being given to aliens, that people will rise up and become very radical. In fact, practice has shown that’s not necessarily true. In the same sense that I thought draft resistance was the answer to the war, social services is not the answer to the critical needs of the community. Ultimately, what can make it (the Asian community) a healthy positive environment for people to grow up and live in, is a question of the larger environment of this society—the interplay between the two.
What we need is Asian leadership—political leadership. Not the old style community leaders, but political leaders. A whole new breed of people who are dedicated to the notion that it’s only a revolution, and at that, a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist type of revolution that’s going to free our people. This is really a hard point. I don’t know how to explain it very clearly right now except that people will become leaders when they fully understand the context in which we operate. I think that a lot of Asian young people now operate on the assumption that capitalism, racism, imperialism are all part of the same package of oppressors, and that socialism is the way out. But as to how to fight one to get the other is the question. That’s where you need leadership.
Leadership comes from several things. It comes from study, practice, and self-conscious practice … going out and seeing if your theories work. If you develop a political line—let’s say that Japanese people need to organize a strong Japanese leadership movement, which can ally itself with other strong groups in other communities—well, what you need are people who not only see that as a necessity but are also willing to take the risks, to expend the energy to go out and try to build that organization.
One of the things I’m trying to understand is that revolution is really a science … of how people interreact, how society moves and changes. And if it’s a science, then we have to apply a revolutionary scientific method. What we need are people with the wisdom to be able to abstract revolutionary hypotheses and then the courage to test them.
We have a lot of leaders in the old style sense … like me, who are looked up to because we’ve been big talkers and have a certain knowledge. But that’s not leadership in the sense I mean leadership.
I think there have been two things accomplished in the Asian movement that are important. One is that there are thousands of young people all over the United States who believe in socialism as an answer to capitalism, imperialism, and racism. That’s one whole huge accomplishment. We’ve broken the brain-washing by immigrant parents from China and the anti-communism from Nisei parents. The other thing we’ve learned is serving people’s needs—the little that has been done—is not the most direct route to the revolution. The question is now what is the most direct route? Who are the most important people in our community to be organizing—the most advanced people? We don’t even know who are going to be our bravest people.
There are very good examples, though. I just found out yesterday that Doug Yamamoto (U.C. Santa Cruz student, charged with fire bombing the Santa Cruz Armed Services Recruiting Center, following the February ’71 invasion of Laos) was sentenced for three years. The judge told him that we can’t have people like you running around loose and “I was lenient in letting you plead guilty to the lesser charge”—that kind of attitude. They didn’t even have the courage to tell Doug’s people where they were taking him. As soon as the gavel came down they handcuffed him and took him out of the court and that was it. Apparently as he left, he said “Keep the spirit up,” which we should take as an admonition from a very courageous brother who decided that things had come to a certain point in his own life. He may not have known the exact reasons, but he decided that he had to do something besides being peaceful, calm about things. That’s a very courageous thing for him to have done. In my own view of Doug’s trial, he didn’t deserve to be in jail.
QUESTION: What does being a people mean? What does being a community mean?
SUMI: First of all, we have to understand that we’re all Third World people inside the United States—and it’s not really clear at this point, what that actually means in terms of organizing for the revolution. What it does mean is that we have a certain common basis of oppression; our enemy is the same. We have to get together as Third World people to fight the same enemy.
Ultimately, our goal in organizing is to be able to build that Third World solidarity within the United States. But in terms of what it means to be an Asian people. I think there are two things to that. One is how are we oppressed? The second is how have we fought in the past, how shall we fight in the present and into the future? That then means that we’re not just Asians. We are Filipinos, Koreans, Samoans, Chinese, Japanese, and so on. It means that the ways we are oppressed concretely are different. It means that most Filipinos are rural proletariats who are farm workers while most Japanese are urban worker-types: gardeners, seamstresses … While there are Chinese who live in ghettoes, there are not many Japanese ghettoes left.
On the other hand, the largest slogans, the ones that try and move people forward quickly, are the ones that do bind us together—that we are all oppressed as Asian people, that racism toward Asian people looks a certain way at this point in history, as opposed to the way it looks towards Blacks. I suspect the more militant we get, the more it’ll look like the stuff that comes down on Black people. When you organize—when you talk to your mother, you talk to her about specific things that have happened to her because she’s Chinese. And you also try and mention the things that are similar to Chinese people as to Japanese people as to Filipino people. Ultimately, you’ll have to mention why it’s similar to Black, Brown, Red, Vietnamese, South African, Palestinian, everybody else. That’s what it means to me to be an Asian people, for myself. Organizing on a mass level, it means being Japanese; on the revolutionary level, it means being Third World. They’re all one and the same. We are oppressed people. Third World people have always been oppressed people in this country. To fight means we must fight together. One million Asians combined with thirty million Blacks, combined with fifteen million Browns is a whole lot of people.
QUESTION: You mentioned that there’s some common issues like the anti-war movement that can unite all segments of the Asian community because they all have an interest in this anti-Asian racism that’s being disseminated. How has the organization gone on that one issue?
SUMI: I think that if you take a more militant stand it seems to go better than a liberal stand. I marched in the April 24 demonstration in San Francisco with the Asian contingent. That was everybody: Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese. We marched together, waving red books and carried the People’s Chinese flag, a Pathet Lao flag, some North Korean flags, Vietnamese flags, a Chinese flag—and it was good! There was more unity under that kind of militant feeling of politics than I felt at Peace Sunday (Anti-War Teach-in, Los Angeles, May, 1971) even though Peace Sunday was an important event.
QUESTION: You’ve always stressed the fact that Asian people have expressed a solidarity with the American people. They also stress how important the American movement is, and many times, it seems that the movement fails the Indo-Chinese, because of all the internal bickering. What kinds of concrete expression can Asian Americans give to the Indo-Chinese?
SUMI: First of all, they should be concrete ones. We have to confront anti-Asian racism coming home and over in Asia. Steps are being taken to recognize that racism against Asians comes in special forms as against black or brown people. The People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice just held its national convention and decided to call national actions on Hiroshima-Nagasaki weekend to protest Asian genocide. And that’s a great step forward for the white movement to be thinking on those terms. I think Asian people need to take a greater leadership position in opposing the war. We are in fact the visible reminder in this country of what is going on over there. And that has to be brought up to the American people over and over again.
Our own brothers continue to go into the military, willingly, without questions asked. Draft counseling has to be stepped up. Parents have to be educated to keep their sons out of the military by any means necessary. There already are surprising numbers of Japanese and Chinese draft resisters and A.W.O.L.’s in Canada. And that’s a big step.
Another simple thing we can do is letter writing campaigns to Washington instead of Hanoi saying that if you want the P.O.W.’s released, set a date to withdraw. The Indo-Chinese that I’ve met do have a special feeling for us as blood relatives and it’s a shame we don’t have the same feeling for them.
Hiroshima was a racist experiment on Third World people to see what the bomb would do. There’s no other possible justification for it. The Emperor already sued for peace but was ignored because the bomb wasn’t quite ready for use. Then immediately after the bombing, he again sued for peace; and of course, isn’t that a real military victory? Six hundred thousand Asians to save a few thousand whites … that’s exactly the logic behind Vietnamization—as long as Asian people are dying, that’s O.K., but not white people.
QUESTION: But how does the movement respond to that alienation? For one thing, the Nisei are alienated. They get ulcers all the time. Sansei are very alienated too, to the extent that the young generations identify less with Asians. How can a movement deal with that?
SUMI: First of all, I think we have to understand the power of the people. Power to the people means figuring out who the people are. The people are not abstract. They are human beings—all of them, each one of them. That means our parents, our friends who are bikers, low riders, friends who are into having two kids and living out in Monterey Park. Those are the people. Of course, some are going to be more willing to fight on their own behalf. Poor people and oppressed people are going to be more willing to fight than people in Monterey Park.
But at the same time, when you talk about struggle against racism, racism has affected all of us. Economic exploitation has affected all of us in some degree or other. It means that we have to approach those people with respect instead of “You bourgeois reactionary so-and-so’s. I come to tell you the word.” You just can’t approach people with that attitude. The revolution is a mission in the sense of making things better. But not in the sense that you have to proselytize people because they’re in the dark. People are not “saved by the revolutionary word”—because people are wise. Not wise in the sense that you just point out a contradiction and they’ll say give me the gun. But they’re wise in the sense that they know the implications of a society-wide revolution and that it includes them. They are wise because they’ve lived in this country. One of the things they’re afraid of is that it’s only them.
The Nisei, the middle-aged ones, and the Chinese who live in Chinatown are really isolated from each other. They lived through a terrible period of history and they became very afraid; afraid of informers; afraid of each other because twenty Asians together was a mob. Carmen Chow (from I Wor Kuen) tells a story of a man who came from Chinatown to a meeting called by people to hear the Young Lords and the Panther Party talk about their programs. The old man turned to comment afterwards—“Well, I’m so glad. I knew the Chinese wouldn’t be able to do something by themselves, but I’m so glad that the Blacks and Browns are with us. Then maybe we’ll have a chance to win.”
Basically, I think if we investigate where our parents and grandparents are at, what they’re afraid of is that they lost once. The camps were a real defeat for our people. Further, the end of the radical movement in the late 40’s and early 50’s in which many of our parents and grandparents participated was a real defeat. You just don’t get over a defeat like that. You learn a lot of distrust because, most of all, people didn’t know why they were defeated. They learned to distrust organized Communists and radicals. They learned to distrust ideology. They felt betrayed and they were. They didn’t know just exactly what had gone wrong. For us to approach people who have battle scars from many previous battles with condescension instead of respect isn’t in any sense building a movement. It alienates people. We should give them a sense that they had interesting lives, that they have lived battles, that they are good and brave people, and that we have a lot of respect for them.
I know whenever people are defensive, Nisei in particular, they always come up with “We tried too. We tried to make a better world when we were young.”
They’ll even bring up examples of “We resisted.” Everyone has examples of that. You just don’t live in this country for so many years without somewhere in their memory having some event where they fought back. The question is to awaken that feeling in people again and get them all to fight back in one direction; then there’s real power. If you begin to really listen to your parents and grandparents and all their friends, you begin to understand what the power of people really means, because they really do have power. They really are courageous, only they need something to fight for. They need a sense of strength in our organization and leadership and some reason to fight.
QUESTION: The Filipinos in Delano have always asked for Asian support, but there has never been any organized effort to help them.
SUMI: I think the Filipinos are very much organized behind the strike. The Japanese thing I don’t understand because many are ex-farm workers. I don’t know as we’ve really tried. There have been a lot of real issues we’ve let go—Vietnam is one, Delano is another. They’re real issues raised for Asian people in this country and we’ve kind of let them slide.
QUESTION: What other issues do you see coming up?
SUMI: The rise of Japanese militarism is something that we’ve got to confront. And Japanese have to do that. Otherwise, it’s going to be purely a nationalist thing with Chinese and Filipinos. Japanese have to begin to educate their people about what is really happening in Japan. I think Korea is just going to explode soon. There’s going to be war in Korea with the U.S. involved and the guerrilla movement in the South. And we’ve got to be prepared for that.
We’ve never been really able to deal with the issue of drugs. One thing we haven’t really done for people who have gotten off drugs is to provide a movement alternative for them that meets them from where they’re at. They are street people, and they want confrontation. They want something much more militant, and we’ve failed to provide that. Many have come into the J.A.C.S. office or a similar project for two months and they go right back out and back on dope. Movement people bad mouth them, call them failures. But people don’t fail themselves. They fail because there is a failure of leadership to explain and make viable something to do.
I’ve been rereading Edgar Snow’s RED STAR OVER CHINA. It’s very interesting how Chairman Mao became a radical. He went through more changes than I’ve been through—more kinds of liberalism and political philosophies. At every critical point, there was some leadership to guide him to something more correct and because he was a student and from the middle class background, it was alright for him to go through changes like that. But street people are not like that, especially poor street people. They’re not willing to skate around and live an interesting life. They really want action to confront the pigs. They know that the pigs have been oppressing them. It may be for a while that we’ll continue to lose them. A lot of those people did not become part of the movement until there was a viable Red Army in China. Then they came in droves. Whole gangs of bandits and city lumpen joined the Red Army. But even then, some drifted back into banditry and were eventually killed by the people who had then been armed.
I’m trying to absorb what this means. I have a sense that things are a lot more urgent than we think they are in Los Angeles. I think Nixon’s got something planned after ’72 or even before in order to win the election. Millions die each year in this country and around the world because of this country’s economic system and government. We have to stand up sometime. And I think that time is now. If the Chinese get sent to the camps, it’s too late to start talking about them then. We have to fight racism and our racist government right now.
QUESTION: What future plans do you have?
SUMI: I feel that it’s very necessary to find out what leadership means in a revolutionary sense, not only for myself but community wise—finding and developing new forms of leadership. It’s necessary to find other parts of our community, the working people, the poorer people—and get them to understanding that self-determination means that they must become organized and powerful. I really want to write some more.
QUESTION: What about working with Asian women’s groups?
SUMI: I think I’d be interested in working with war brides, but I don’t know where to begin … I don’t think it’s useful politically to mobilize women except to help them become stronger themselves, at this point, until a leadership organization and the most militant segments of our community are mobilized. I could see having women’s groups among the most militant … then you have something to talk about and organize around. You’ll have some really committed and dedicated people.
For a lot of people still—for most people in L.A.—I get the feeling that it’s still a game. I’m bothered by that because I can remember what it was like when you had to live with the day-to-day fear of getting killed. I remember what it’s like to be an Indo-Chinese wondering when the bombs are coming next. That sense of real purpose, of real dedication to confronting the enemy still is lacking. As long as it’s lacking, the most militant people will not be mobilized.
All of this is a lot of words just to say what I summed up in the beginning—that as Asian people, if we seek to explain the problems of ourselves, our community and all poor and oppressed peoples in the United States, we come to the conclusion that revolution is the only answer. We must cease being Japanese frogs at the bottom of the white American well seeing only what that defines for us. We must make our own definitions by seeing the totality of who we are and where that puts us.
All Power to the People!