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The point of radicals, particularly radicals who deal with the politics of identity in any shape or form, is to provide that elite, is to provide that vanguard.

You all know the technology of a bullet. A bullet is very significant in the impact it can have on a wall or a piece of wood or per force the human body, but if a bullet is perforated in the top or has mercury injected into the top and is sealed in again it becomes a far more devastating weapon. It becomes what is known as a dum-dum bullet.

Now, if a vanguard is to have the effect of such retreated bullets so that conceptually and actually the energy and vigor of debate is transformed by the use of such a vanguard and its terminology, it has to be aware of where it’s coming from, what its tradition is, where it’s going to, and what it represents at a particular time. Just because most of the politics of this era seems to running well and truly against us does not mean that the situation is hopeless, because situations are never hopeless. Groups that have been done down or perceive that they’ve been done down by history have undergone worse traumas than we are undergoing at the present time.

The danger of the ideology of the victim, which I don’t really subscribe to except as a tactic on occasion, is that you begin to think like a victim, and you begin to act like a victim. Many of our people now are almost asking for a whipping, asking for a collective beating, asking to be forgiven for the past, asking to be forgiven for sins and crimes of the past which they never committed, which they’re hardly aware of, which can be reconstrued as episodes of heroic cruelty or glorious vanguardism that don’t even need to be apologized for in the past or in the present.

There’s a degree to which I personally think that the doctrine of vanguardism is the way out of the dilemma that we face.