Valarie Kaur, born to Sikh parents, tells her story of life in America. Her Sikh roots (her grandparents moved to the U.S. over a century ago as farmers) enabled her to be a warrior – to fight for change, against injustice, racial hatred, gender stereotypes, sexual assault, and white supremacy. Her fight started with 9/11, but she felt the hatred and fear of colored skin even when she was a child. And she and her community still fight back after over twenty years, not with hatred or violence, but with revolutionary love.
What is revolutionary love?
Here are excerpts from the book.
Revolutionary love is the choice to enter into labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political, rooted in joy. Loving only ourselves is escapism, loving only our opponents is self-loathing, loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.
Loving others – see no stranger. Seeing no stranger begins in wonder. It is to look upon the face of anyone and choose to say: you are a part of me I do not yet know. Wonder is the wellspring for love. Who we wonder about determines whose stories we hear and whose joy and pain we share, who we grieve with, who we sit with and weep with, are ultimately those we organize with and advocate for. When a critical mass of people come together to wonder about one another, grieve with one another, and fight with and for one another, we begin to build the solidarity needed for collective liberation and transformation- a solidarity rooted in love.
Loving opponents – Tend the wound: an opponent is any person whose beliefs, words, or actions causes violence, injustice, or harm. The word enemy implies permanence, but opponent is fluid. We have a range of opponents at any given time, distant and near. Even the people closest to us can become our opponents for a moment. It is daring to put all these people in one big category, but it is useful, for whether our opponents are political or personal, persistent or fleeting, we can practice tending the wound- ours, and if it is safe, theirs. We can rage in safe containers to process our pain, listen to understand the contexts that enable our opponents to cause harm, and use that information to reimagine cultures and institutions that protect dignity for all of us. Attending the wound is not only moral but strategic: it is the labor of remaking the world.
Loving ourselves – Breathe and Push: loving ourselves is a feminist intervention: it is choosing to care for our own bodies and lives as a priority. In all of our various labors – making a life, raising a family, or building a movement- we can care for ourselves by remembering the wisdom of the midwife: breathe and push. We can breathe to draw energy and power into our bodies and let joy in, we can push through fear and pain to become our best selves, including through healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation. And in the most convulsive movements of our lives, we can summon our deepest wisdom and find the bravery to transition, undertaking the fiery and life-giving labor of moving from one reality into another. Laboring in love is how we birth the world to come.
Revolutionary love is practiced in community. Each of us has a role in any given time period we can all be midwives in this time of great transition period the future might still feel dark and unknown, and we might not live to see the world to come, but when we choose to show up with love, or labor becomes an end in itself. We can measure our lives not by what we produce, but our faithfulness to the labor. Revolutionary love is demanding labor, but it is also creative, transformative, and joyful labor – immeasurably complex and messy, tumultuous and revelatory, marked by wonder, and worth it. Revolutionary love is how we last.
The book chronicles how hate crimes have risen since 9/11 and how Sikhs, with their turbans, have been a prime target for violence. Over the years, it’s not just the Sikhs, but also people of color and religious institutes that have been targeted over and over again. Kaur says America is in transition.
But transition is an imperfect metaphor. There is no one point new society is born. We always find ourselves in the middle of a cycle. At this moment, you may be seeing around you earlier stages of a movement taking form. Or you may be seeing the president’s pen on a civil rights bill. Often when you bear witness to the first, you will not be in the room for the second, but what matters is the choice to show up to the labor in front of you, with the specific gifts you have been given, to play your particular role. When we labor in love, we not only make future victories possible, we also begin to transform the world within us and around us, here and now.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Kaur demonstrates through her works as an activist how not to hold on to hate, and bring forth love. Revolutionary love is a practice that can transform a relationship, a community, a culture, and even a nation.
What I felt when reading the book
Sadness, inspiration, understanding, and life lessons – I was deeply moved by what Kaur says in the book. In the midst of a war between Ukraine and Russia, this book shows the readers the power of wonder – if only all of us could see no stranger but look at others and say: You are part of me I do not yet know. – would we able to avoid all the violence?
See no stranger has helped me imagine new ways of being with each other, and with ourselves – so that together we can begin to build the world we want to see. This is a must-read for everyone.
Life lessons – excerpts from the book
Wonder is where love begins but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once they no longer see others as part of them, they disable their instinct for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them. Entire institutions built to preserve the interests of one group of people over another depend on this failure of imagination. Violence comes in the form of policies by the state and sometimes bloodshed in the streets. More often, it comes in forms that are hard to see, unless we find a way to make them visible through our stories.
Our minds are primed to see the world in terms of us and them. We can’t help it. The moment we look upon another person’s face, our minds discern in an instant whether or not they are one of us- part of our family or community or country- or one of them. This happens before conscious thought. Our bodies release hormones that drive us to trust and listen to those we see as part of us and to fear and resent them. It is easier to feel empathy and compassion for one of us, much harder for one of them. When one of us does something bad, we tend to attribute it to circumstance, but when one of them does the same, we attribute it to essence- oh that’s just how they are. We think of us as complex and multidimensional; we tend to think of them as simple and one dimensional. We are much more likely to intervene when we already see a victim of violence as part of us. We tend to stand by when people we see as them are harmed, whether by policies of the state or violence on the street. In other words, who we see as one of us determines who we let inside our circle of care and concern.
Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: they reduce others to single, crude images.
Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an act of surrender.
Grief does not come in clean stages. It is more like the current of a river, sweeping us into a new emotional terrain, twisting and turning unexpectedly. In one moment, we need to cry and rage, in another we feel nothing at all. And in another we feel a sense of acceptance, until we find ourselves one day sobbing on the steering wheel of a car as a song plays on the radio. Grief has no end really. There is no fixing it, only bearing it. The journey is often painful, but suppressing grief is what causes the real damage- depression, loneliness, isolation, addiction, and violence. When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love with them.
Grieving together, bearing the unbearable, is an act of transformation. It brings survivors into the healing process, creates new relationships, and energizes the demand for justice. We come to know people when we grieve with them through their stories and rituals. It is how we build real solidarity, the kind that shows us the world we want to live in and our role in fighting for it.
Martin Luther King Junior said “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
Who is your sacred community, your sangat? You just need three kinds of people: someone who sees the best in you, someone who’s willing to fight by your side, and someone who can fight for you when you need help. Bring them together and you have created a pocket of revolutionary love.
Neurobiologists called oxytocin the love hormone. The more oxytocin in the body, the more care and nurturing mammals show for their babies. Oxytocin decreases aggression in the mothers body overall with one exception- in defense of her young, when babies are threatened, oxytocin actually increases aggression. For mothers, rage is a part of love- it is the biological force that forces or protects that which is loved.
Rage is a healthy, normal and necessary response to trauma. It is a rightful response to the social traumas of patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and poverty. But we live in a culture that punishes us when we show our teeth, we are called hysterical when we raise our voice; we are less likely to be believed when we tell our story with fury; and, if we were anything other than differential with an officer, we might get hurt or shot, and even then, our deference might not make a difference. Black and brown people have been schooled in the suppression of our emotions as a matter of survival.
The opposite of repression is also dangerous. Too many men have been socialized to unleash rage without apology. For men, rage is often a secondary emotion that masks sadness or shame. Violence is the socially conditioned default for male rage, and the proliferation of guns has made male aggression deadlier than ever. Suppressed anger always finds a way to explode. For women and girls, it is more likely to explode internally as self-hatred or stress or illness. For men and boys, it is most likely to erupt as violence against others.
How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed? By Bell hooks
Toni Morrison’s novel Love: Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemies.
The more I listen, the less I hate. The less I hate, the more I’m free to choose actions that are controlled not by animosity but by wisdom. Laboring to love my opponents is how I love myself. This is not the stuff off saintliness. This is our birthright. Listening is also a strategic choice. The more I listen, the more I understand. I am persuaded that there is no such thing as monsters in this world, only human beings who are wounded.
Pain that is not transformed is transferred says Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. When we leave people alone with their pain, their alienation becomes the precondition for radicalization. But in listening to people’s pain, we can help them transform it.
How do we make these with beloved ones who become ghosts? The secret is to understand that a relationship with them has not ended even though they are gone. If haunting is possible in death, then healing is possible too. The dance is endless: the circle of listening goes on even after death when their voice becomes internal to us.
Forgiveness is not forgetting: Forgiveness is freedom from hate.
Sometimes reconciliation happens in the course of healing; Sometimes it does not. What matters is the insistence that our liberation is possible. Pushing together through healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation is the labor of revolutionary love.
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done. We are all broken by something. We have all heard someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent” – civil rights leader and death penalty abolitionist Bryan Stevenson. In tending our wounds, we show mercy to ourselves and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy to others. We are released from our attachment to punishment period we evolve our pursuit of justice from retribution- and eye for an eye- to collective liberation.
All that you touch, you change. All that you changes, changes you. The only lasting truth is change – Octavia E. Butler.
Love is more than a rush of feeling. Love is sweet labor- fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life giving. A choice we make over and over again. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. When we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love. Transition feels like dying but it is the stage that precedes the birth of new life. Progress during birthing labor is cyclical, not linear. It is a series of expansions and contractions, and each turn through the cycle brings us closer to what is being born.
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