I wanted to share an experience I had taking BA to a friend of mine who’s white and she’s been in the kind of identity politics movement here in the Bay Area and has been relegated to kind of a “service role” [in the movement] because of the framework of those movements that say that we should base our leadership on color and gender and sexuality and things like that. And it’s been a remarkable experience to see someone who, in their own words, never even considered the idea, for the first time open up to see that they have something to contribute to the movement, that they are and can be leaders and strategic commanders of this movement. And I think that, to me, it’s important that we really confront the narrow ideologies and thinking that holds us back and embrace the leadership that we have.

And I want to say that I’m really excited for all of who BA is. I’m excited about the history of him growing up and his experience with the Black Panther Party and moving out into the world to create the organization and the new communism. We should not be defensive about that, that BA is white—and that’s great, it’s great! Because what’s great about him is what he’s been able to understand and bring forward and his experience, and to me, the lesson of that should be that everybody from wherever they’re from has something to bring to this movement and contribute. And what I want to see in this world is—I want to see everyone, no matter what their background is, to being able to give all they have to give and be able to develop all that they can develop to take part in the transformation of all of humanity.

One of the things that really speaks to me about the new communism is... and BA has this real sense of the possibility—it was spoken to earlier about how everyone has so much creative potential in the world and it’s being held back by the nature of this beast of a system that views people as just commodities to be ground up; it’s being held back by these different ideologies that look at movements as commodities, again, to be possessed. Whereas, this New Year’s statement, BA, the new communism, this body of work, really looks at all of humanity and all of our potential.

I came from, myself, an identity politics background, and more nationalist movements, and a lot of people come up through these channels. But we can’t stop there, right? We have to be open to learning and changing our ideas, to embracing what’s actually true about the world so that we can change it. And I loved hearing Joe Veale talk about being in prison, right, and the brothers telling him you can’t get into Avakian because he’s white, and then Joe Veale getting into BA and seeing just how no one that he had been looking at or following or reading, was digging into the questions of the liberation of Black people the way BA was and continues to do.

Especially off of the beautiful uprising, I know in the hearts and minds of a lot of Black people coming forward, young people, intellectuals, and all peoples of different nationalities and so on, people are trying to answer the question of what is a way out of this madness, what’s really going to stop the horrors that we’re seeing. And I want to point people to: that we have an answer to this, we have a method to this. And it’s a method that all of us can take up... and to really check ourselves—there’s a lot that you don’t understand and I didn’t understand about what science is and what science applied to the world is. There’s a lot that people don’t understand about what communism is and what the new communism is. And there’s a lot that people don’t understand about who Bob Avakian is and what it means to take up and follow him. And so my challenge is for all of us is, especially in this moment... to open ourselves up especially to that creative inquiry, to that struggle, to really dig into theory and then bring that theory out into the world and practice it. Because we all have that ability to transform ourselves and all of humanity.