D rawing from her religion, her personal experience, and recent events, she suggests that the only way forward is revolutionary love love for ourselves, others, and our opponents. She shows how the personal, spiritual, social, and political are all part of a single tapestry, and reveals how addressing the problems in our world requires attention in all areas of life, as well as respect for all persons. She tells about confronting sexual and sexist abuse in her own life and family, and shares intimate accounts of finding the love of her life, address ing health problems, and giving birth to her children. See No Stranger moves back and forward in Kaur’s life, weaving very personal strands with the stories of her religious faith, of communities affected by hate crimes, and of recent social and political events. In her 2018 TED talk she says, “stories can create the wonder that turns strangers into sisters and brothers.” Indeed, her moving stories taught me to respect and appreciate fellow citizens whose lives I had not understood before. Later s he became a Yale-educated civil rights lawyer who worked with her filmmaker husband to let the world know about ongoing attacks against religious and ethnic groups in the United States and to tell the stories of those affected by hate crimes. In that moment Valerie Kaur found her public voice, and something amazing happened. She wrote, “I wanted to give everything I had to this moment, to give my all to the fight.” She was not prepared, however, when the police came to arrest the line of students blocking traffic and she ended up being the one with the microphone, the person who needed to explain both to the police and to the frustrated commuters the reason for the protest. The night before the action, Kaur shifted her name from the group not willing to be arrested to the group willing to risk arrest, if necessary. The action was designed to stop morning traffic, “to shut down business as usual” and protest the war. After months of futile anti-war activism, she participated with other Stanford students in a non-violent direct action on the streets of San Francisco on the morning the United States began raining down bombs on Baghdad. She was back at Stanford while the United States prepared for war against Iraq, a war that the government justified using false claims. She interviewed the families, and with the video camera document ed what had happened. She and a cousin with a video camera got in a car and traveled all over the country for months to visit communities where hate crimes had taken place. On September 15, domestic terrorism affected Kaur in a deeply personal way when a dear family friend she called Uncle Balbir was shot outside the gas station he owned in Mesa, Arizona, while he was planting flowers. Almost immediately, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Arab, and South As i an Americans became victims of hate crimes by white Americans in the United States. Before she could fly to India for her research, however, the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center towers took place in New York City on September 11, 200 1. Yet from early childhood onward, she experienced painful discrimination against her dark skin, female body, and Sikh religion.Īs a student at Stanford University she received a grant to record stories of survivors of the massacres that took place during the 1947 Great Partition that separated India and Pakistan. She grew up in rural California, part of the third generation in her family to be a U.S. Kaur was raised in a faith that taught her to “ s ee no stranger,” that is, to recognize and treat each person as part of oneself. I recently read a moving, powerful book that combines the personal, spiritual, and political, to show how, in the life of author Valarie Kaur, they are one.
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