See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

by Valarie Kaur

Revolutionary love is the call of our times. If you cringe when people say that love is the answer, I do, too. I am not talking about sentimentality or civility or thoughts and prayers. I am talking about love as labor, a conscious embodied practice. Social reformers and spiritual teachers through history led entire nonviolent movements anchored in the ethic of love. Time and again, people gave their bodies and breath for one another, not only in the face of fire hoses and firing squads but also in the quieter venues of their daily lives. Black feminists like bell hooks have long envisioned a world where the love ethic is a foundation for all arenas of our society. It’s time to reclaim love as a force for justice.

were mostly reported as isolated incidents in the local news. But the FBI would report a 1,600 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the year that followed 9/11—a number that reflects only a fraction of the violence that actually occurred because so many incidents were not reported or classified as hate crimes at all.

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.

Our leadership kept the nation in a heightened state of terror. The image of the brown turbaned “Muslim terrorist” seared into Americans on 9/11 was reinforced over and over again by a government that arrested, detained, deported, registered, and surveilled Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, and immigrants. Sher Singh was just the first of thousands of innocent people to endure this treatment. After his release, federal officials rounded up, detained, and interrogated more than twelve hundred Muslim and Arab men in the course of two months.

Dr. King named three evils—racism, poverty, and militarism. But he left out a fourth—sexism. The assumption that women and girls are less than equal and therefore deserve less dignity and freedom is perhaps the most ancient, pervasive, and insidious evil of them all. But sexism is not a single issue. “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives,” said black feminist Audre Lorde. “Intersectionality,” a term coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a concept that black women have used since Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in 1851. It describes how women fight on multiple fronts: Women of color must fight racism in addition to sexism; if they are poor and rural women, they must also fight poverty; if they are queer women, homophobia; if they are trans women, transphobia; if they are disabled women, stigma and barriers to access; if they are undocumented women, the threat of detention, deportation, and family separation. Since multiple inequalities determine our power and privilege and lived experience in society, these inequalities must be fought together, by all of us. Otherwise we fail our movements and ourselves.

Too many men have been socialized to unleash rage without apology. For men, rage is often a secondary emotion that masks sadness or shame.

Divine rage is fierce, disciplined, and visionary. It is the fearsome wrath of Ekajati, or Blue Tara, when she fought demons in Tibetan Buddhist legends. Or the fury of Jesus when he overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple in Christian scripture. The aim of divine rage is not vengeance but to reorder the world. It is precise and purposeful, like the focused fury projected into the world from the forehead of the goddess. It points us to the humanity of even those who we are fighting. Kali is clad in a tiger skin: It is only through accessing her ferocity that divine rage can take form in the world. Perhaps our task as human beings is to find safe containers for our raw reactionary rage—and then choose to harness that energy in a way that creates a new world for all of us.

The Center for American Progress reported that between 2001 and 2009, seven foundations poured $42.6 million into well-organized think tanks to promote anti-Islam ideologies through blogs, books, and films. As the anti-Islam industry grew, the nation saw a disturbing rise of hate groups, now a thousand strong. The number of hate groups had grown by more than 50 percent since 2000.

Right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade following 9/11, causing 254 fatalities. In contrast, there have been 20 terrorism-related plots carried out by American Muslims in 13-plus years, accounting for 50 fatalities.

Activists in indigenous communities are reclaiming their warrior traditions in nonviolent ways. In their nonviolent protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), Native American water protectors drew upon their ancestors’ resistance to colonization. One elder reflected that in the 1970s, some members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) were armed because they did not know the force they might encounter from government officials. But during protests at the Standing Rock reservation, water protectors ensured that there were no weapons in their camp and pointed to the tools of social media, where they could amplify their message and find protection through solidarity. “Our words are our arrows now,” one said. “Our laptops are our shields.”