She is also frank about the verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse that was inflicted on her by the hands of men in her Sikh community. She chronicles a must read account of the 2012 Oak Creek massacre, which was the most violent hate crime against Sikhs in American history. In her book, Kaur describes in vivid detail how many men in her own Sikh community were killed after 9/11 because ignorant, racist people assumed they were Muslim terrorists. Failing to wonder ultimately leads to violence against people who we consider the other. This act of wonder, she says, will help make the world a better place. She defines revolutionary love as the active decisions humans make to wonder about others, our opponents, and ourselves.
In See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, Kaur provides us a book that is part memoir and part how to manual on how to practice what she describes as “revolutionary love”.
It’s one of those precepts that is easier said than done, but civil rights lawyer, activist, and filmmaker Valarie Kaur has given us a book that can help us to do this work.
One of the hardest things we can do as humans is to love our enemies. See No Stranger helps us 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. Drawing from the wisdom of sages, scientists, and activists, Kaur reclaims love as an active, public, and revolutionary force that creates new possibilities for ourselves, our communities, and our world. Kaur takes readers through her own riveting journey-as a brown girl growing up in California farmland finding her place in the world as a young adult galvanized by the murders of Sikhs after 9/11 as a law student fighting injustices in American prisons and on Guantánamo Bay as an activist working with communities recovering from xenophobic attacks and as a woman trying to heal from her own experiences with police violence and sexual assault. Starting from that place of wonder, the world begins to change: It is a practice that can transform a relationship, a community, a culture, even a nation.
It enjoins us to see no stranger but instead look at others and say: You are part of me I do not yet know. How do we love in a time of rage? How do we fix a broken world while not breaking ourselves? Valarie Kaur-renowned Sikh activist, filmmaker, and civil rights lawyer-describes revolutionary love as the call of our time, a radical, joyful practice that extends in three directions: to others, to our opponents, and to ourselves.
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