See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

by Valarie Kaur

“Revolutionary love” is the choice to enter into wonder and 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 and 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.

Before my family arrived in California’s Central Valley, this land was not farmland. It was home to the Yokut and Wintu peoples for thousands of years. Their society was among the most linguistically diverse in North America. When this land became part of the United States, the first governor of California armed local militias and sanctioned the extermination of all indigenous peoples. Scalp bounties were posted, some for $5 a head. Men, women, and children were hunted like animals. The indigenous population of California fell from 150,000 to 30,000 in just twenty-seven years from 1846 to 1873, making the California genocide the most documented genocide in North America.

In the United States, white supremacy is intertwined with Christian supremacy, one an extension of the other. Any theology that teaches that God will torture the people in front of you in the afterlife creates the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth.

What does it take to reclaim wonder now after so much trauma and devastation?

Wondering about others helps us to wonder about ourselves. What stereotypes have we absorbed? Where do they come from? All of us assume that we are good people. When we set aside the labels “good” and “bad,” we can begin to wonder about our effect on the world, which of our actions create the world we want, and which destroy it. We can begin to let go of the stories that no longer serve us.

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.

Today we know that trauma is passed down from parents to children through generations, epigenetically. It is a revolutionary scientific discovery. Perhaps this is why the trauma after 9/11 felt so familiar. But Sikhs had also inherited a story of resilience—a warrior tradition with cultural and spiritual practices that were developed through the centuries. Perhaps this accounts for the fiery courage I saw in Sikh elders determined to live, work, and raise their children in America anyway. If the trauma of violence and oppression is inherited from our ancestors, might we also inherit their resilience and bravery?

I could not help asking myself: Would people have shown up if Balbir Uncle had been less virtuous? Did people of color have to be perfect in order for our lives to be grievable? I marveled at the labor it took to prove our humanity—it seemed like we had to be superhuman in order to be seen as human. But looking back at history, even that has not been enough.

Show up at the public vigils and memorials to grieve, in person. You don’t need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them.

If you are like me, sometimes you are just too tired. Too tired to cry. Too tired to feel. When that moment comes, I ask you not to judge the emotions in your body. Let them come and go. There is something called “empathy fatigue” that happens when we get overloaded by other people’s pain. The good news is that you don’t need to feel empathy all the time. Love is not a rush of feeling: Love is sweet labor. What matters is the work your hands do. So, breathe and rest and, when you are ready, see if you can wonder about the world just a little, just enough to show up to the labor one more day. Let wonder surprise you.

Would the officers see Roshan as a terrorist? Would they hurt him? I thought of all the women who cannot call the police on their husbands, brothers, and sons—black women, Latinx women, Muslim women,

Asian women, indigenous women, trans women, any woman with good reason to think that the police will see their men as animals instead of people and abuse them, detain them, deport them, or pull the trigger too soon. What is “national security” for women whose families are not secure in this country, whose bodies are not secure in their own homes? What is “national security” for women whose race or religion or status makes it dangerous to trust the officers sworn to protect us?

Divine rage can make people uncomfortable: It can feel disruptive, frightening, and unpredictable. There are those who wish to police such rage in the name of civility. But civility is too often used to silence pain that requires people to change their lives.

“Anger is loaded with information and energy,” says Audre Lorde. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

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? —bell hooks

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. —Thomas Merton

I had been made to believe that overwork was the only way to make a difference. I had come to measure my sense of worth by how much I produced, how well I responded, and how quickly. I had worked for so long, and so hard, and at such great speeds, that I had become accustomed to breathlessness. I could not remember the last time I had a long night of rest. Or gazed at the night sky. Or danced. I told myself that it was for good reason, that the need was so great, and our work too important. Perhaps you too have felt this way. This is what I want to tell you: You don’t have to make yourself suffer in order to serve. You don’t have to grind your bones into the ground. You don’t have to cut your life up into pieces and give yourself away until there is nothing left. You belong to a community and a broader movement. Your life has value. We need you alive. We need you to last. You will not last if you are not breathing.

But we can act consciously so that our wellness does not come at the expense of others. If we pay for childcare or housekeeping, we can ensure that domestic workers, often poor black and brown women for whom such respite is not accessible, have fair wages and hours so that they, too, can breathe. If justice work is a matter of choice for us, we can reach out to support those for whom it is not. When the next crisis comes, we can step into the fire to respond, so that others can step back to rest. Perhaps we can cook a meal for a family, volunteer childcare, organize an action, or help another grieve, rage, and breathe. In any given moment, each of us has a role in the labor of revolutionary love.

I realized what was stopping me: an inflated sense of self-importance. I was acting as though things would fall apart without me, that others could not do the work as well as I could. But, really, I was just terrified that I would no longer have worth if I shifted from doing to being. I had grown so accustomed to the breathlessness of crises that paying attention to my own breath in my body was the new frightening thing.

I thought about my own community’s choice to pray for the gunman after the mass shooting of Sikhs in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Forgiveness was not a substitute for justice; it had energized us in the fight for justice. It reframed justice not as retribution but as cultural and institutional transformation.

I thought about what made Roshan’s apology genuine. First, he was willing to wonder about himself, his psyche, family, and conditioning, and to investigate the reasons he committed harm. Second, he was willing to wonder about me and imagine how I felt when he hurt me and in all the suffering that followed. Third, he admitted what he had done. He was specific and detailed. He took full responsibility for the consequences of his actions, regardless of his intention. Finally, he did the work of reparation. Eve Ensler calls these four elements the alchemy of the apology—a process that can be taught, modeled, and practiced. “The mandate is never on the victim to forgive,” she says. “But the alchemy of the apology can free us.”*

America needs to reconcile with itself and do the work of apology: To say to indigenous, black, and brown people, we take full ownership for what we did. To say, we owe you everything. To say, we see how harm runs through generations. To say, we own this legacy and will not harm you again. To promise the non-repetition of harm would require nothing less than transitioning the nation as a whole. It would mean retiring the old narrative about who we are—a city on a hill—and embracing a new narrative of an America longing to be born, a nation whose promise lies in the future, a nation we can only realize by doing the labor: reckoning with the past, reconciling with ourselves, restructuring our institutions, and letting those who have been most harmed be the ones to lead us through the transition.

We can model solidarity in all our movement spaces, both in person and virtual. These days, I honor indigenous peoples before I speak, for their memory is the correct starting point for history in the Americas. I seek out ways to center black lives, for black liberation is central to our collective liberation. I follow the lead of women of color who are also queer, disabled, or poor, for they show us how to leave no one behind.

Listening does not grant the other side legitimacy. It grants them humanity—and preserves my own.