See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

by Valarie Kaur

Your breathlessness is a sign of your bravery. It means you are awake to what’s happening right now: The world is in transition.

Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. Love as labor can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.

“Revolutionary love” is the choice to labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. It begins with wonder: You are a part of me I do not yet know. It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political, sustained by 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.

When we wonder about people, grieve with them, and choose to fight with and for them, we can build the kind of solidarity the world needs.

When we rage in safe containers to tend to our own wounds, and listen to understand theirs, we can gain the information we need to reimagine solutions.

Back then, there was no question: The earth under me, the stars above me, the animals around me, were all part of me. And wonder was my first orientation to them all, the thing that connected me to them: You are a part of me I do not yet know.

when we choose to wonder about people we don’t know, when we imagine their lives and listen for their stories, we begin to expand the circle of those we see as part of us. We prepare ourselves to love beyond what evolution requires.

Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, Mirabai to love without limit. They all expanded the circle of who counts as one of us, and therefore who is worthy of our care and concern. These teachings were rooted in the linguistic, cultural, and spiritual contexts of their time, but they spoke of a common vision of our interconnectedness and interdependence.

Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence.

Love is dangerous business, Papa Ji explained. If you choose to see no stranger, then you must love people, even when they do not love you. You must wonder about them even when they refuse to wonder about you. You must even protect them when they are in harm’s way.

These articles were meant to make Sikhs visible, so that we could never hide in a crowd, or hide from the call to fight for justice.

Wonder is an admission that you don’t know everything about another.

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?

Violence is a rupture. Violence makes a hole—not just the damage it inflicts on the body of a person but the pain it causes in the body of a people. The hole swallows up language, memory, and meaning and leaves us in a scarred and stripped landscape. Hannah Arendt calls this the private realm, the dark shadowy place that violence throws us into, shocked and speechless and alone in our loss.

The act of naming the violence and grieving loss in community is how the hole turns into a wound that can heal.

The only choice is to find a way to speak—and grieve—even when our wounds are still open and bleeding.

The journey is often painful, but suppressing grief is what causes the real damage—depression, loneliness, isolation, addiction, and violence.

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.

If the trauma of violence and oppression is inherited from our ancestors, might we also inherit their resilience and bravery?

Our story of exceptionalism doesn’t allow us to confront our past with open eyes. A nation that cannot see its own past cannot see the suffering it has caused, suffering that persists into the present. A nation that cannot see our suffering cannot grieve with us. A nation that cannot grieve with us cannot know us, and therefore cannot love us.

First people grieved together. Then they organized together.

How can we presume to grieve people we never knew, people who don’t look like us or share the same history with us? Here is the answer: Grieve with those who loved them. Grieve with the living. That is the revolutionary act.

Unresolved grief inside a person is tragic; unresolved grief inside a nation is catastrophic: It releases enormous aggression. In the name of the dead—in Joe’s name—the U.S. war on terror that began in Afghanistan would come to span at least two decades, three presidencies, and seventy-six countries; cost more than $5.6 trillion; and kill more than one million people.

the radical King who declared that our real enemies were not individuals but unjust systems, the three evils of “poverty, racism, and militarism.”

As long as the United States carried out a war on terror that bombed Muslim-majority countries abroad and profiled Muslims and immigrants at home, hate violence against our communities would continue.

Shallow solidarity was based on the logic of exchange—You show up for me, and I will show up for you. But deep solidarity was rooted in recognition—I show up for you, because I see you as part of me. Your liberation is bound up in my own.

Today Americans are seven times more likely to be killed by a white right-wing extremist than a terrorist who kills in the name of Islam.

My injuries fell far short of what other people suffered. The police officer hurt my arm but did not break it; my molestation did not rise to the level of rape. As long as I compared my suffering with others’, I could not access compassion for myself, only more shame.

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.

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?

I do not owe my opponents my affection, warmth, or regard. But I do owe myself a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate. “I shall permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him,” said Booker T. Washington.

Empathy is cognitive and emotional—to inhabit another person’s view of the world is to feel the world with them. But I also know that it’s okay if I don’t feel very much for them at all. I just need to feel safe enough to stay curious. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters.

For decades, documentary filmmakers have told stories about immigrants and refugees and survivors of violence. Empathy was the goal. The idea was that if we just humanized people, it would motivate audiences to action. But witnessing suffering does not necessarily lead to meaningful action. The credits roll; we go home or swipe the screen. We think that something has been accomplished because we are emotionally spent, but nothing has changed.

But the purpose of listening across lines of difference is not agreement or compromise. It is understanding. True understanding is not possible unless we risk changing our worldview. Otherwise we think we have built bridges to one another, but the bridges are rooted in sands that can shift with the tide.

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

“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.

I discovered that meeting regularly in safe spaces outside the walls of the institution is necessary to nurture bravery. At first these gatherings will feel like pockets of resistance, acts of survival. Then you might invite a new person to join you. And then another. And another. Soon that space might grow. Before you know it, you will not be resisting anymore. You will be embodying a different set of norms. From here, you can see the institution with new eyes and find opportunities for intervention. Or revolution.

Under the direction of Mike and Muneer, we engaged the right strategies at the right time and sustained advocacy for years with the formidable resources of the law school. But none of this would have been possible had the church basement not been a place for the community to reimagine the world as it ought to be.

We do not need religion to imagine the world we want. But we do need more spaces to imagine and wisdom about how to do it.

Law was a strong tool to reform broken institutions. But these prisons were not broken. They did exactly what they were designed to do. We could not reimagine them—there was no version of them that did not inflict harm. No, we had to dismantle them. We had to imagine America without them.

This is our moment to declare what is obsolete, what can be reformed, and what must be reimagined. I hold fast to the instruction Reva gave me—to master the world as it is, and labor for what it ought to be.

a handful of us were thrust in front of the cameras with a near-impossible task: to explain who Sikhs were in the first place, help people see us not as outsiders but as Americans like them, place this shooting in the broader context of ongoing hate violence since 9/11, invite them to grieve with us, and call them to action, all in two-minute sound bites.

The world sends a barrage of signals that our bodies—as women, people of color, women of color, queer people, trans people, and disabled people—are not beautiful or strong or worthy of love. Taking the time to breathe—literally and metaphorically—is a way to assert that our bodies are worthy and beloved. Loving our bodies is the first and primal act of loving ourselves.

For a fleeting moment, these young men wanted to find the white power group that radicalized Page and exact revenge. But that impulse had receded. They were surrounded by sangat—community—and breathing as one.

Chardi kala was woven into Sikh scriptures and our vernacular, commonly translated as “relentless optimism.” But what I witnessed in Oak Creek and what I was learning from this family was different from optimism. This was not about the future at all. This was about a state of being in the present moment, as if now is all there is. Now and now and now. It is moving from Moment with a capital M to Moment with a capital M. This is a state of joyfulness inside the struggle—an energy that keeps us in motion, a breathing that keeps us laboring, even inside the pain of labor.

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

Look around you. What is the most beautiful thing that you can see right now? Look at it for a moment. Notice its color, and shape, the way the light falls on it. Let yourself wonder at it. No matter what is happening out there in the world right now—no matter how dark or violent or cruel—this beautiful thing also exists. The world right here is just as real as the world out there.

Perhaps it is time to shift the terms from “self-love” to “loving ourselves.” Loving ourselves happens in community.