Valarie Kaur - See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

It was New Years Eve 2016. My friend Rev. William Barber II had invited me to speak at the Metropolitan AME Church, a historic black church in Washington, D.C. Like millions of Americans, I was still in shock over the results of our presidential election. I looked out at that crowded church and saw grief and anticipation in peoples eyes.

The future is dark, I said. But what ifwhat if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind us now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ear, You are brave? What if this is our nations greatest transition?

The crowd erupted in cheers and shouts and cries of Hallelujah! Reverend Barber was on his feet, his great bear hands outstretched over me.

What does the midwife tell us to do? I cried over the roar.

Breathe! And then? Push!

In the weeks that followed, the address was viewed about forty million times around the world, and my words began to appear on protest signs. I received thousands of inquiries from people asking: How do we breathe? How do we push? How do we keep laboring for justice when we feel hopeless? I also became a target of online hate from the Far Right and got messages that I should be deported or killed, and my son, too. I was a civil rights activist and lawyer who had labored with brown and black communities since 9/11. I was also a Sikh American, a woman of color, for whom these struggles were deeply personal. Now I was also a new mother, and exhausted. I needed to answer these questions for myself, as much as for others.

And so, I stepped back from crisis response. I spent a year living outside the country in a remote part of the rain forest in Central America with my family. I was given a gift that is rare among women who are activists and mothers: a room of my own and time to think. My husband and my father pulled a writing desk up the mountain with ropes. My mother unpacked one hundred pounds of handwritten journals I had kept since the age of seven. In the mornings we hiked with our two-year-old son Kavi, and in the afternoons I worked at my desk alone as mist drifted through the green valley. The rain forest felt like a wombwarm, wet, safe, and generative. I read texts on ethics, social justice, and the science of human behavior, and I pored over the stories of my lifespiritual teachings of my Sikh roots, hard lessons of frontline activism, primal truths discovered in the labor of childbirth. I began to see patterns of wisdom. And I began writing this book.

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 globepropping 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 twenty-five 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 beena nation that is multiracial, multifaith, multicultural, and multigendered, where power is shared, and we strive to protect the dignity of every person? Or will we continue to descend into a kind of civil wara power struggle with those who want to return America to a past where only a certain class of white people hold political, cultural, and economic dominion?

The stakes become dire with climate change. The same supremacist ideologies that justified colonialismthe conquest, rape, massacre, and enslavement of black and brown people around the globethose same ideologies justify industries that accumulate wealth by pillaging the earth, poisoning the waters, and darkening the skies. Global temperatures climb, seas rise, storms intensify, fires rage. Humanity itself is in transition. Will we marshal the vision, skill, and solidarity to solve these problems together, or will we perish?

Is this the darkness of the tomb, or of the womb? I dont know. All I know is that the only way we will endure is if each of us shows up to the labor.

Revolutionary love is how we stay in the fire. I believe revolutionary love is the call of our times.