3 lessons of revolutionary love in a time of rage Valarie Kaur
(Sikh Prayer) Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa,
Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.
There is a moment on the birthing table
that feels like dying.
The body in labor stretches
to form an impossible circle.
The contractions
are less than a minute apart.
Wave after wave,
there is barely time to breathe.
The medical term:
“transition,”
because “feels like dying”
is not scientific enough.
(Laughter)
I checked.
During my transition,
my husband was pressing down on my sacrum
to keep my body from breaking.
My father was waiting
behind the hospital curtain …
more like hiding.
But my mother was at my side.
The midwife said
she could see the baby’s head,
but all I could feel was a ring of fire.
I turned to my mother and said, “I can’t,”
but she was already pouring
my grandfather’s prayer in my ear.
(Sikh Prayer) “Tati Vao Na Lagi,
Par Brahm Sarnai.”
“The hot winds cannot touch you.”
“You are brave,” she said.
“You are brave.”
And suddenly I saw my grandmother
standing behind my mother.
And her mother behind her.
And her mother behind her.
A long line of women who had
pushed through the fire before me.
I took a breath;
I pushed;
my son was born.
As I held him in my arms,
shaking and sobbing
from the rush of oxytocin
that flooded my body,
my mother was already
preparing to feed me.
Nursing her baby as I nursed mine.
My mother had never stopped
laboring for me,
from my birth to my son’s birth.
She already knew
what I was just beginning to name.
That love is more than a rush of feeling
that happens to us if we’re lucky.
Love is sweet labor.
Fierce.
Bloody.
Imperfect.
Life-giving.
A choice we make over and over again.
I am an American civil rights activist
who has labored with communities
of color since September 11,
fighting unjust policies by the state
and acts of hate in the street.
And in our most painful moments,
in the face of the fires of injustice,
I have seen labors of love deliver us.
My life on the frontlines of fighting
hate in America has been a study
in what I’ve come to call
revolutionary love.
Revolutionary love
is the choice to enter into labor
for others who do not look like us,
for our opponents who hurt us
and for ourselves.
In this era of enormous rage,
when the fires are burning all around us,
I believe that revolutionary love
is the call of our times.
Now, if you cringe when people say,
“Love is the answer …”
I do, too.
(Laughter)
I am a lawyer.
(Laughter)
So let me show you how I came to see love
as a force for social justice
through three lessons.
My first encounter with hate
was in the schoolyard.
I was a little girl
growing up in California,
where my family has lived
and farmed for a century.
When I was told that I would go to hell
because I was not Christian,
called a “black dog”
because I was not white,
I ran to my grandfather’s arms.
Papa Ji dried my tears –
gave me the words of Guru Nanak,
the founder of the Sikh faith.
“I see no stranger,” said Nanak.
“I see no enemy.”
My grandfather taught me
that I could choose
to see all the faces I meet
and wonder about them.
And if I wonder about them,
then I will listen to their stories
even when it’s hard.
I will refuse to hate them
even when they hate me.
I will even vow to protect them
when they are in harm’s way.
That’s what it means to be a Sikh:
S-i-k-h.
To walk the path of a warrior saint.
He told me the story
of the first Sikh woman warrior,
Mai Bhago.
The story goes there were 40 soldiers
who abandoned their post
during a great battle against an empire.
They returned to a village,
and this village woman
turned to them and said,
“You will not abandon the fight.
You will return to the fire,
and I will lead you.”
She mounted a horse.
She donned a turban.
And with sword in her hand
and fire in her eyes,
she led them where no one else would.
She became the one she was waiting for.
“Don’t abandon your posts, my dear.”
My grandfather saw me as a warrior.
I was a little girl in two long braids,
but I promised.
Fast-forward, I’m 20 years old,
watching the Twin Towers fall,
the horror stuck in my throat,
and then a face flashes on the screen:
a brown man with a turban and beard,
and I realize that our nation’s new enemy
looks like my grandfather.
And these turbans meant to represent
our commitment to serve
cast us as terrorists.
And Sikhs became targets of hate,
alongside our Muslim brothers and sisters.
The first person killed in a hate crime
after September 11 was a Sikh man,
standing in front
of his gas station in Arizona.
Balbir Singh Sodhi
was a family friend I called “uncle,”
murdered by a man
who called himself “patriot.”
He is the first of many
to have been killed,
but his story –
our stories barely made the evening news.
I didn’t know what to do,
but I had a camera,
I faced the fire.
I went to his widow,
Joginder Kaur.
I wept with her, and I asked her,
“What would you like to tell
the people of America?”
I was expecting blame.
But she looked at me and said,
“Tell them, ‘Thank you.’
3,000 Americans came
to my husband’s memorial.
They did not know me,
but they wept with me.
Tell them, ‘Thank you.'”
Thousands of people showed up,
because unlike national news,
the local media told Balbir Uncle’s story.
Stories can create the wonder
that turns strangers
into sisters and brothers.
This was my first lesson
in revolutionary love –
that stories can help us see no stranger.
And so …
my camera became my sword.
My law degree became my shield.
My film partner became my husband.
(Laughter)
I didn’t expect that.
And we became part
of a generation of advocates
working with communities
facing their own fires.
I worked inside of supermax prisons,
on the shores of Guantanamo,
at the sites of mass shootings
when the blood
was still fresh on the ground.
And every time,
for 15 years,
with every film, with every lawsuit,
with every campaign,
I thought we were making the nation safer
for the next generation.
And then my son was born.
In a time …
when hate crimes against our communities
are at the highest
they have been since 9/11.
When right-wing nationalist movements
are on the rise around the globe
and have captured
the presidency of the United States.
When white supremacists
march in our streets,
torches high, hoods off.
And I have to reckon with the fact
that my son is growing up
in a country more dangerous for him
than the one I was given.
And there will be moments
when I cannot protect him
when he is seen as a terrorist …
just as black people in America
are still seen as criminal.
Brown people, illegal.
Queer and trans people, immoral.
Indigenous people, savage.
Women and girls as property.
And when they fail to see our bodies
as some mother’s child,
it becomes easier to ban us,
detain us,
deport us,
imprison us,
sacrifice us for the illusion of security.
(Applause)
I wanted to abandon my post.
But I made a promise,
so I returned to the gas station
where Balbir Singh Sodhi was killed
15 years to the day.
I set down a candle
in the spot where he bled to death.
His brother, Rana, turned to me
and said, “Nothing has changed.”
And I asked,
“Who have we not yet tried to love?”
We decided to call the murderer in prison.
The phone rings.
My heart is beating in my ears.
I hear the voice of Frank Roque,
a man who once said …
“I’m going to go out
and shoot some towel heads.
We should kill their children, too.”
And every emotional impulse
in me says, “I can’t.”
It becomes an act of will to wonder.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why did you agree to speak with us?”
Frank says, “I’m sorry for what happened,
but I’m also sorry
for all the people killed on 9/11.”
He fails to take responsibility.
I become angry to protect Rana,
but Rana is still wondering about Frank –
listening –
responds.
“Frank, this is the first time
I’m hearing you say
that you feel sorry.”
And Frank –
Frank says, “Yes.
I am sorry for what I did to your brother.
One day when I go to heaven
to be judged by God,
I will ask to see your brother.
And I will hug him.
And I will ask him for forgiveness.”
And Rana says …
“We already forgave you.”
Forgiveness is not forgetting.
Forgiveness is freedom from hate.
Because when we are free from hate,
we see the ones who hurt us
not as monsters,
but as people who themselves are wounded,
who themselves feel threatened,
who don’t know what else
to do with their insecurity
but to hurt us, to pull the trigger,
or cast the vote,
or pass the policy aimed at us.
But if some of us
begin to wonder about them,
listen even to their stories,
we learn that participation
in oppression comes at a cost.
It cuts them off
from their own capacity to love.
This was my second lesson
in revolutionary love.
We love our opponents
when we tend the wound in them.
Tending to the wound
is not healing them –
only they can do that.
Just tending to it allows us
to see our opponents:
the terrorist, the fanatic, the demagogue.
They’ve been radicalized by cultures
and policies that we together can change.
I looked back on all of our campaigns,
and I realized that any time
we fought bad actors,
we didn’t change very much.
But when we chose
to wield our swords and shields
to battle bad systems,
that’s when we saw change.
I have worked on campaigns
that released hundreds of people
out of solitary confinement,
reformed a corrupt police department,
changed federal hate crimes policy.
The choice to love our opponents
is moral and pragmatic,
and it opens up the previously
unimaginable possibility
of reconciliation.
But remember …
it took 15 years to make that phone call.
I had to tend to my own rage
and grief first.
Loving our opponents
requires us to love ourselves.
Gandhi, King, Mandela –
they taught a lot about
how to love others and opponents.
They didn’t talk a lot
about loving ourselves.
This is a feminist intervention.
(Applause)
Yes.
Yes.
(Applause)
Because for too long have women
and women of color been told
to suppress their rage,
suppress their grief
in the name of love and forgiveness.
But when we suppress our rage,
that’s when it hardens
into hate directed outward,
but usually directed inward.
But mothering has taught me
that all of our emotions are necessary.
Joy is the gift of love.
Grief is the price of love.
Anger is the force that protects it.
This was my third lesson
in revolutionary love.
We love ourselves
when we breathe through the fire of pain
and refuse to let it harden into hate.
That’s why I believe
that love must be practiced
in all three directions
to be revolutionary.
Loving just ourselves feels good,
but it’s narcissism.
(Laughter)
Loving only our opponents
is self-loathing.
Loving only others is ineffective.
This is where a lot
of our movements live right now.
We need to practice
all three forms of love.
And so, how do we practice it?
Ready?
Number one …
in order to love others,
see no stranger.
We can train our eyes
to look upon strangers on the street,
on the subway, on the screen,
and say in our minds,
“Brother,
sister,
aunt,
uncle.”
And when we say this,
what we are saying is,
“You are a part of me I do not yet know.
I choose to wonder about you.
I will listen for your stories
and pick up a sword
when you are in harm’s way.”
And so, number two:
in order to love our opponents,
tend the wound.
Can you see the wound
in the ones who hurt you?
Can you wonder even about them?
And if this question
sends panic through your body,
then your most revolutionary act
is to wonder, listen and respond
to your own needs.
Number three:
in order to love ourselves,
breathe and push.
When we are pushing
into the fires in our bodies
or the fires in the world,
we need to be breathing together
in order to be pushing together.
How are you breathing each day?
Who are you breathing with?
Because …
when executive orders
and news of violence hits our bodies hard,
sometimes less than a minute apart,
it feels like dying.
In those moments,
my son places his hand
on my cheek and says,
“Dance time, mommy?”
And we dance.
In the darkness, we breathe and we dance.
Our family becomes
a pocket of revolutionary love.
Our joy is an act of moral resistance.
How are you protecting your joy each day?
Because in joy we see
even darkness with new eyes.
And so the mother in me asks,
what if this darkness
is not the darkness of the tomb,
but the darkness of the womb?
What if our future is not dead,
but still waiting to be born?
What if this is our great transition?
Remember the wisdom of the midwife.
“Breathe,” she says.
And then –
“push.”
Because if we don’t push, we will die.
If we don’t breathe, we will die.
Revolutionary love requires us
to breathe and push through the fire
with a warrior’s heart and a saint’s eyes
so that one day …
one day you will see my son as your own
and protect him when I am not there.
You will tend to the wound
in the ones who want to hurt him.
You will teach him how to love himself
because you love yourself.
You will whisper in his ear,
as I whisper in yours,
“You are brave.”
You are brave.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Sikh Prayer) Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa,
Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.
(Applause)
(Cheering)
(Applause)