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# 2025-02-27 - See No Stranger by Valerie Kaur
A friend recommended this book to me and i checked it out from the
local library. This book exceeded my expectations. I clearly see
beauty in the author, inside and out. The stories brought to mind
a salmon surviving aggravated hazards, passing through a gauntlet of
trials, and finally succeeding against all odds, returning home.
This manifesto of revolutionary love touched my heart. Reading this
book had a wholesome influence on me, and it felt worthwhile.
# Introduction
This book is for a world in transition. At this moment, Far-Right
ethnic supremacist movements are rising in the United States, across
Europe, and around the globe--propping up demagogues, mainstreaming
nativism, undermining democracies, politicizing the very notion of
truth, and failing to safeguard the most vulnerable among us. The
United States is also in the midst of a demographic transition.
Within 25 years, the number of people of color will exceed the number
of white people for the first time since colonization, and we are at
a crossroads: Will we birth a nation that has never been--a nation
that is multiracial, multifaith, multicultural, and multigendered,
where power is shared, and we strive to protect the dignity of every
person?
"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. ... revolutionary love can only be
practiced in community.
Revolutions do not happen only in grand moments in public view but
also in small pockets of people coming together to inhabit a new way
of being. We birth the beloved community by /becoming/ the beloved
community.
# Chapter 1: Wonder
My favorite was our origin story: the story of Guru Nanak, the first
teacher of the Sikh faith. Five centuries ago, the story goes,
half-way around the world in a village in Punjab of the Indian
subcontinent, there lived a young man named Nanak. He was deeply
troubled by the violence around him, Hindus and Muslims in turmoil.
One day, he disappeared on the bank of a river for 3 days. People
thought he was dead, drowned. But Nanak emerged on the third day
with a vision of Oneness: /Ik Onkar/, the Oneness of humanity and of
the world. This vision threw him in a state of ecstatic
wonder--/vismaad/--and he began singing songs of devotion called
/shabads/, praising the divine within and around him. In other
words, he was in love. Love made him see with new eyes: Everyone
around him was a part of him that he did not yet know.
"I see no stranger," said Guru Nanak, "I see no enemy." Guru Nanak
taught that all of us could see the world in this way. There is a
voice inside of each of us called /haumai/, the I that names itself
as separate from You. It resides in the bowl that holds our
individual consciousness. But separateness is an illusion. When we
quiet the chatter in our heads, through music or meditation or
recitation or song, the boundaries begin to disappear. The bowl
breaks. For a moment, we taste the truth, sweet as nectar--we are
part of one another. Joy rushes in. Long after the moment passes,
we can choose to remember the truth of our interconnectedness, that
we belong to one another. We can /choose/ to "see no stranger."
The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It
echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual
teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. Guru Nanak
called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion,
Abraham to open our tent to all, ... 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.
But you don't have to be religious in order to open to wonder.
Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the
beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once
they no longer see others as part of them, they disable their
instinct for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do
anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them. Entire
institutions built to preserve the interests of one group of people
over another /depend/ on this failure of imagination.
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.
Our minds are primed to see the world in terms of /us and them/. We
can't help it. This happens /before/ conscious thought. Our bodies
release hormones that prime us to trust and listen to those we see as
part of /us/ and to fear and resent /them/.
The most powerful force shaping who we see as /us and them/ is the
dominant stories in our social landscape. We breath them in, whether
or not we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a
marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others
and ourselves. In brain imaging studies, for example, nearly half of
black people, queer people, and women exhibited unconscious fear and
distrust in response to pictures of people who looked like them. In
other words, we live in a culture that makes us strange to ourselves.
In the United States, white supremacy is intertwined with Christian
supremacy, one and extension of the other. Any theology that teaches
that God will torture people in front of us in the afterlife creates
the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth. The
European colonizers who arrived on this soil assumed that dark bodies
could not contain the inner life they experienced in themselves.
Once they no longer saw the faces in front of them as equals, they
could call people strangers on their own land, savage to the touch,
ripe for conversion: They could concentrate them, enslave them,
pillage them, consolidate their resources, and build an empire on
their soil in the name of God and country.
* * *
"I just can't believe that there could be a God who would send me to
hell," I said. There was a pause as she looked at me. I was ready to
fight.
"I can't either," she said. She saw my shock and explained "I think
there are many paths. It just doesn't make sense otherwise. Of
course, some people don't agree." Then she laughed. There was a
sparkle in her eyes. I started crying, she handed me tissues, and I
threw my arms around her. Her name was Faye and she was the first
Christian I had ever met who did not believe I was going to hell. I
would go on to meet many more people like her and learn that there
are many ways to be Christian, just as there are many ways to be Sikh.
Seeing no stranger is an act of will. In brain-imaging studies, when
people are shown a picture of a person of a different race long
enough for comprehension, it is possible for them to dampen their
unconscious fear response. We can change how we see.
# Chapter 2: Grieve
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 ion our loss. Human beings
cannot remain in this silence and survive, and so we have to learn to
say what is unsayable. We tell a story about the violence to make
sense of it, and the story returns us to the public realm where
grieving is possible. The act of naming violence and grieving loss
/in community/ is how the hole turns into a wound that can heal.
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. ... Grieving is an act of surrender.
* * *
White supremacy has always been twinned with Christian supremacy in
America--slavery was justified as a Christian mission, indigenous
people were forced to convert at the barrel of a gun. "Confucian"
and "Hindoo" laborers were barred from citizenship.
New horrors keep arising from old impulses. The past keeps bleeding
into the present. No civilization in the world is exempt. But what
is particular to America is that many who suffered enormous loss and
destruction have had to do so alone, and had to marshal language to
tell the story, only to find that there was no one to hear it because
their suffering contradicts the story that the nation keeps telling
itself--the story of American exceptionalism. /America is a beacon
of light, the singular enforcer of truth./ 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.
There have always been people who did what the nation as a whole did
not.
America's greatest social movements--for civil rights, immigrant's
rights, women's rights, union organizing, queer and trans rights,
farmworker's rights, indigenous sovereignty, and black lives--were
rooted in the solidarity that came from shared grieving. First
people grieved together. Then they organized together. Often, they
sang and celebrated together.
You may say: "It's too much--all this grief, all this violence and
injustice, it's too hard." You are right: The mind can comprehend
one death, but it cannot comprehend thousands, especially when one's
own community, nation, or ancestors played part in causing the death.
... Can you choose one person to practice wondering about? Can you
listen to the story they have to tell? If your fists tighten, or
your heart beats fast, or if shame rises to your face, it's okay.
Breathe through it. Trust that you can. The heart is a muscle: The
more you use it, the stronger it becomes. ... You don't need to know
people in order to grieve with them. /You grieve with them in order
to know them./
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./
# Chapter 3: Fight
The fight impulse is ancient and fundamental. It is biological. ...
The question therefore is not whether or not we will fight in our
lives but /how/ we choose to fight.
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
explains 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.
We need allies in our lives, and in our movements, who wonder,
grieve, and fight with us and for us. Perhaps a better word is
"accomplices," a term invoked by indigenous leaders. We need
accomplices who will conspire with us to break rules in order to
break chains...
So, I invite you to step into this rich part of my tradition with
four questions. First, what is your sword, your /kirpan/? What can
you use to fight on behalf of others--your pen, your voice, your art,
your pocketbook, your presence? Second, what is your shield, your
/dhal/? What can you use to protect yourself and others when the
fight is dangerous--your camera, legal counsel, a group of allies,
public witness? Third, what is your instrument, your /dilruba/? In
Sikh legend, our ancestors designed the /dilruba/, a string
instrument small enough for soldiers to carry on their backs into the
battlefield, so that they could lift their spirits in music, song,
and poetry in the mornings before they faced the fire. Your
/dilruba/ can be what centers you--singing, dancing, drumming,
walking, yoga, kirtan, prayer, meditation. Finally, what is your
sacred community, your /sangat/? You just need three kinds of
people. Someone who sees the best in you. Someone who is willing to
fight by your side. And someone who can fight /for/ you when you
need help.
# Chapter 4: Rage
I had always thought that the opposite of love was rage, the extreme,
irrational, uncontrollable expression of anger, the force that drove
people to hurt others with their words or weapons. Rage was to be
tamed and wrestled down like a wild animal within us. We were only
as evolved or spiritual or good as our ability to subdue it. Only
when our rage was subdued could we unlock our human potential to love
others, even our opponents. I don't know when I learned this, but it
ran so deep that it must have been at the onset of memory.
This was a lie.
The opposite of love is not rage. The opposite of love is
indifference. Love engages all of our emotions... We cannot access
the depths of loving ourselves or others without our rage.
As a little girl in India, my mother did not know any woman whose
body had not been violated in some way. But these women followed the
unwritten rule in the sky: Silence is survival. The Sikh faith
professes radical equality between women and men, but Punjabi culture
was still steeped in patriarchy. She had hoped that it would be
different for our generation, here in America. But patriarchy and
gender oppression are not local anomalies. There is no nation, no
community, and no corner of the earth where women and girls are as
safe as men.
[As a legal observer at a protest, the author was arrested and
injured. Her injuries resulted in chronic, debilitating pain. She
made multiple attempts to love her opponent: through understanding,
compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. But none of these helped.]
The first step to loving our opponents is rage.
[Tommy Woon] was one of my advisors from college, a dean of
multicultural education and a trailblazer in healing historical
trauma. He operated on the premise that healing begins in the body,
and the brain follows. Trauma alienates us from our bodies, he
explained. When we face a threat, our bodies release a flood of
stress hormones so that we can protect ourselves. We can fight,
flee, or freeze [or fawn]. If we can't do any of those fully, then
our internal alarms never turn off. Memories of trauma keep flooding
our thoughts; panic keeps gripping us; the past keeps bleeding into
the present. In extreme cases, we cope by numbing and
dissociating--abandoning our bodies so that it is difficult to feel
sensation. Tommy believed that I had a "disrupted fight impulse." I
did not need to relive my trauma through talk therapy. I needed to
access my fiercest emotions and reclaim my agency--in my mind /and/
body. One way to do this was to experience an alternate narrative.
When I tore up these men with my fangs, I was not destroying them. I
was destroying my projections of them. My mind had turned them into
monsters--bad guys with infinite power over me. But there is no such
thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are
wounded. These men had hurt me out of their own suffering. It was
common, it was banal. When we cannot see that evil is driven by a
person's wounds, not their innate nature, we become terrified of each
other. But the moment we see their wounds, they no longer have
absolute power over us. I could not see the wound in them until I
tended to the wound inside me. And that required me to access my rage.
Neurobiologists call oxytocin the love hormone: The more oxytocin in
the body, the more care and nurturing mammals show for their babies.
Oxytocin decreases aggression in a mother's body overall with one
exception--in defense of her young. When babies are threatened,
oxytocin actually increases aggression. For mothers, rage is part of
love: It is the biological force that protects that which is loved.
[I have also read that oxytocin works along in-group & out-group
lines. It makes us warmer toward our in group, and less empathetic
toward our out-group. I can imagine this might mean that heightened
oxytocin or sensitivity to oxytocin might amplify racism as well as
empathy.]
Rage is a healthy, normal, and necessary response to trauma. It is a
rightful response to the social traumas of patriarchy, white
supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and poverty. But we
live in a culture that punishes us when we show our teeth--we are
called hysterical when we tell our story with fury; and, if we are
anything other than deferential with an officer, we might get hurt or
shot, and even then, our deference might not make a difference.
Black and brown people have been schooled in the suppression of our
emotions as a matter of survival. ... We now have data to prove what
community healers know well: Repressing anger comes at a cost to our
health. It results in high rates of autoimmune diseases. It
amplifies our perception of pain.
The opposite of repression is also dangerous. Too many men have been
socialized to unleash rage without apology. For men, violence is the
socially conditioned default for male rage, and the proliferation of
guns has made male aggression deadlier than ever. Mass shooters are
typically men, and the majority of those men have physically abused
the women in their lives.
The solution is not to suppress our rage or let it explode, but to
process our rage in /safe containers/--emotional spaces safe enough
to express our body's impulses without shame and without harming
ourselves and others. Only when we give rage an external expression
outside our bodies can we be in relation with it. We can then ask:
What information does my rage carry? What is it telling me? How do
I want to harness this energy?
Divine rage can make people feel 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.
# Chapter 5: Listen
There comes a point, in the aftermath of cruelty or injury, when I
start to wonder about my opponent: "Why did they do that? Say that?
Believe that? Vote that way? What is at stake for them? What is
driving their behavior?" And I want to find out. Sometimes it's not
safe for me to do this. I need to tend my own wound and keep
processing my rage, grief, and trauma. But when it is safe, I think
about how to listen to their story.
No one should be asked to /feel/ empathy or compassion for their
oppressors. I have learned that we do not need to /feel/ anything
for our opponents at all in order to practice love. Love is a labor
that returns us to wonder--it is seeing another person's humanity,
even if they deny our own. We just have to choose to wonder about
them.
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. ... The more I listen, the less I hate. The less I hate,
the more I am free to choose actions that are controlled not by
animosity but by wisdom. Laboring to love my opponents is how I love
myself.
Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what
we hear. ... The most critical part of listening is asking /what is
at take for the other person?/ I try to understand what matters to
them, not what I think matters. ... When the story is done, we must
return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been
changed by our visit. So I ask myself, "What is this story demanding
of me? What will I do now that I know this?"
* * *
One night in South Carolina, a white evangelical man stood up after
the film and described how he felt under siege in America. "People
think that you and I have nothing in common," he said to me. "But
you and I are not that different. I, too, am seen as an outsider."
He was making a well-meaning gesture, connecting his status as a
white evangelical man with mine as a brown Sikh woman, framing both
of us as minorities. Far from challenging him, I rushed to embrace
the comparison.
There was nothing wrong with this insight of commonality. The
problem is that I did not follow it up--I did not ask the man to say
more about where his feeling of being a minority came from, and so I
never found out whether it was our nation's increasing diversity and
equality that threatened his position of supremacy and made him feel
under siege. Nor did I suggest the ways in which this man and I were
/not/ similar, that his ancestors had likely possessed power over
mine, allowed them to be stripped of citizenship, and profited from
their labor, and that these histories shape the world we both live in
today, affording him access and privilege that I did not enjoy by
virtue of the body I occupied.
Instead I let it be a feel-good moment.
White supremacy as an /ideology/ has been pushed to the margins of
American culture. But white supremacy as a /system/ of structural
advantage that favors white people persists: It animates the
institutions we operate in. It is why our nation's policies on
immigration, criminal justice, and national security continue to
criminalize communities of color, maintaining the climate in which
hate crimes keep happening. We keep talking about hate crimes as
radical acts driven by individual intention. But they are only the
most visible evidence of this broader system at work.
Deep listening is about drawing close to someone's story. It turns
out it is extremely difficult to draw close to someone you find
absolutely abhorrent. How do we listen to someone when their beliefs
are disgusting? Or enraging? Or terrifying? How do we keep
listening when the words are so offensive and dangerous that it seems
that the only rightful response is hostility? An invisible wall
forms between us and them, a chasm that seems impossible to cross.
We don't even know why we should try to cross it. Those beliefs
don't deserve our attention. In these moments, we can choose to
remember that the goal of listening is not to feel empathy for our
opponents, or validate their ideas, or even change their mind in the
moment. Our goal is to understand them. ... In order to create a
safer world for all of us, we must not only defeat such opponents but
invite them into transformation. That means finding a way to
overcome our own emotional resistance and choose to ask questions
about them. This takes work. Neuroscientists call it "cognitive
load"--trying to understand the perspective and pain of people we are
inclined to hate is a dramatic cognitive challenge. The load only
lightens with practice.
When listening gets hard, I focus on taking the next breath. I pay
attention to the sensations in my body: heat, clenching, and
constriction. I feel the ground beneath my feet. Am I safe? If so,
I stay and slow my breath again, quiet my mind, and release the
pressure that pushes me to defend my position. I try to wonder about
this person's story and the possible wound in them. I think of an
earnest question and try to stay curious long enough to be changed by
what I hear. Maybe, just maybe my opponent will begin to wonder
about me in return, ask me questions, and listen to my story. ...
Listening does not grant the other side legitimacy. It grants them
humanity--and preserves our own.
Everyone has a role in the labor of birthing a new America. If you
find yourself in harm's way right now, then it is /not/ necessarily
your role to listen to the people who are terrorizing you. Or to
tend to any kind of wound in them. Your primary responsibility is to
survive, find safety, and tend to the wounds they inflict on you--to
build bonds with people who are willing to wonder bout you, grieve
with you, and fight with and for you. In finding ways to breath, you
are creating the kind of energy and joy that can sustain us all in
the struggle. That is your act of revolutionary love.
But by virtue of whatever privilege you have, if you find yourself
safe enough to do the brave work of listening to your opponents, you
have a vital role to play.
How do we make peace with beloved ones who become ghosts? The secret
is to understand that our relationship with them has not ended even
though they are gone. If haunting is possible in death, then healing
is possible too.
# Chapter 6: Reimagine
The greatest social reformers in history did not only resist
oppressors--they held up a vision of what the world ought to be.
Nanak sang it. Muhammed led it. ... Buddha envisioned it. King
dreamed it. Dorothy Day labored for it. Mandela lived it. Gandhi
died for it. Grace Lee Boggs fought for it for seven decades. They
called for us not only to unseat bad actors but to reimagine the
/institutions of power/ that ordered the world. Take any crisis and
notice the antecedents--in the United States, some of the same
detention camps that hold migrant children today once held Japanese
Americans and before that indigenous people; the criminal justice
system controls more black people today than were enslaved in the
year 1850; the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower
warned about in the 1950s has run a war on terror for so long that
distant war has become a normal feature of American life. Any social
harm can be traced to institutions that produce it, authorize it, or
otherwise profit from it. To undo the injustice, we have to imagine
new institutions--and step in to lead them.
The most powerful institutions in the United States were not built
for most of to be there, let alone hold any kind of power inside
them. Law schools were not originally built for women or people of
color, certainly not women of color. But that doesn't mean that we
don't belong there now or that we cannot change them.
I immersed myself in the study of Constitutional Law, the subject
that Reva taught. I can't say much for my performance in my other
first-year classes, but Constitutional Law I mastered. Reva, my only
woman professor, ran her seminar more around shared inquiry rather
than interrogation. ... All I know is that I found my way into the
law. It began with a simple but profound revelation: The founders
crafted the U.S. Constitution to consolidate power for white
Christian men of an elite class. The rest of us were not counted in
"we the people." The law was designed to colonize and control the
rest of us, not set us free. And yet the founders had invoked words
whose power even they could not constrain--justice, freedom,
equality, the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. These were magical words that had a power of their own
and seized the imagination of the people for whom they were never
meant.
Law was a strong tool to reform broken institutions. But these
prison were not broken. They did exactly what they were designed to
do. [Guantánamo where people were tortured.] 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.
# Chapter 7: Breathe
This time, it happened at home. My skin broke out in a sweat, my
legs gave way, and I collapsed on the steps, my back arched. I felt
like a mongoose squeezed by a boa constrictor, gasping between slow,
deliberate squeezes. Sharat carried me the rest of the way upstairs,
peeled off my clothes, and lowered me into the bath, but my body
would not stop writhing. When the contractions came, there was no
language in my mind except a voice that said "Breathe." Sharat held
my wrists as I twisted in the water. I leaned over the edge of the
bathtub and vomited. He held my back, strong and steady. When the
wailing quieted and the water stilled, he laid me on the bed. ... My
back throbbed and the stone in my belly burned, but I feel asleep.
Later, when Sharat leaned over me with a cup of herbs, he said that
my lips had gone gray. This time it lasted six hours. It would be
another twelve hours before I could eat. And another twenty-four
hours before I would be able to get out of bed again.
It happened almost every month... always at the onset of my period,
suddenly, dramatically, without warning. Like labor without the
gift. ... It went on like this for four years.
A specialist at Yale saw me right away and diagnosed the problem:
endometriosis. Cells similar to the uterine lining were growing on
my ovaries and intestine, bleeding at the onset of my period each
month. The intestinal twist from scar tissue caused the abdominal
contractions. The condition was correlated with vaginismus. [Which
was the result of the author being sexually abused as a child.] The
specialist recommended surgery.
I was lucky. Nearly nine million women and girls in North America
suffer from endometriosis, yet it remains underdiagnosed and
undertreated, an "invisible" women's disease. On average, women and
girls wait eight to eleven years and see five doctors before a
confirmed diagnosis. Women of color and low-income women often
suffer far longer without access to care.
* * *
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 a 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.
The self-help industry profits from "spiritual bypassing"--the belief
that we are changing the world by investing in our spiritual
wellness, even as we continue to participate in the same systems that
oppress people. But we can act consciously so that our wellness does
not come at the expense of others.
# Chapter 8: Push
Healing is the long journey of returning to our bodies. It is a kind
of labor that requires breathing and pushing--resting--and then going
deeper. We must be willing to notice and befriend sensations,
including pain and discomfort. "Physical self-awareness is the first
step in releasing the tyranny of the past," writes trauma researcher
Bessel van der Kolk. Talking about the emotional trauma doesn't
necessarily alter our relationship with it. We must be able to
/feel/ where the trauma lives in our bodies and invite our bodies to
orient to the safety of the present moment.
Forgiveness is not forgetting: Forgiveness is freedom from hate. ...
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.
Reconciliation rests on accountability. It requires perpetrators to
accept full responsibility for their actions. In truth and
reconciliation commissions, the survivor shares the impact of the
harm; the offender accepts responsibility, finds a way to repair it,
and is reintegrated into the community. Such commissions have been
used in more than thirty countries around the world, and, although
imperfect, they were powerful alternatives to retribution.
Reconciliation mends what has been torn asunder, but it does not
return us to a point before the harm happened. Perpetrators and
survivors can just leave each other alone after that.
Two years later, the #metoo movement swept the nation, holding
powerful men accountable for sexual harassment and abuse in public
reckoning.
As time went on, and more abusers were led away in handcuffs, I
realized that I had never see a man who committed sexual or physical
assault make a public apology; a sincere and complete public apology.
... I began to wonder: /could we protect spaces for women to rage and
heal and find justice, and also for men to claim their own process of
accountability, apology, and transformation to earn a pathway back to
community?/
The labor of reconciliation is complicated, unpredictable, and
painful. In most truth and reconciliation commissions, a third party
leads survivors and offenders through the process.
America needs to reconcile with itself and do the work of apology: To
say to indigenous, black, and brown people, we take full ownership of
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
ourselves, restructuring our institutions, and letting those who have
been most harmed be the ones to lead us through the transition.
# Chapter 9: Transition
But if we see the story of America as one long labor, then we have a
different view. Progress during birthing labor is cyclical, not
linear. It is a series of expansions and contractions, and each turn
through the cycle brings us closer to what is being born. I see this
path through U.S. history: A generation fought to abolish slavery and
free people from bondage, but it was followed by a Jim Crow system.
Another generation built a civil rights movement to end segregation
and win equal rights, but it was followed by criminal justice,
immigration, and national security systems that continued to punish
black and brown people. The labor is ongoing, the injustice
relentless. But each time people organized, each turn through the
cycle opened a little more space for equality and justice.
It is time to seek out the deepest wisdom of those who have been most
silenced by the forces of history. When I am in a place that /begins/
by recognizing indigenous peoples, /centers/ black lives, and /leads/
with women of color, I am in a place of deep solidarity. We can
model solidarity in all our movement spaces, both in person and
virtual.
Transition is the most painful and dangerous stage, but it's also
where we begin to see what comes into the space we open up.
Transition is an imperfect metaphor: There is no one point when a new
society is born.
# Epilogue: Joy
Joy is possible even amid great labors--the labor of dying, the labor
of birthing, and the labors in between. We cannot force it. But
when we create moments to breathe between labor pains, and surrender
ourselves to the present moment, notice the colors and light and
feeling of being live, here, together, joy comes more easily. It is
a felt sense in our bodies. In the face of horrors visited upon our
world daily, in the struggle to protect our loved ones, choosing to
let in joy is a revolutionary act. Joy returns us to everything good
and beautiful and worth fighting for. It gives us energy for the
long labor. Letting joy in, therefore, is the tenth practice of
revolutionary love, the core practice that sustains all the others.
author: Kaur, Valarie
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Valarie_Kaur
LOC: BF575.L8 K37
tags: book,compassion,gender,manifesto,memoires,political,race
title: See No Stranger
# Tags
DIR book
DIR compassion
DIR gender
DIR manifesto
DIR memoires
DIR political
DIR race