Valarie Kaur
Valarie Kaur
“Love Outlasts Life”
Like many, Valarie used to roll her eyes upon hearing “Love is the answer.” Part of it, she says, is due to the way America has sensationalized love to mean only a euphoric rush of emotion. This cultural definition excluded the messiness of love and the hard labor of loving others and ourselves, radically and without expectations. As Valarie’s grandfather used to tell her “Love is dangerous business.”
She unpacks her grandfather’s aphorism by saying,
“If I choose to love you, I must let your story into my heart, I must be present to your grief, I must stand up for you when you’re in harm’s way. What happens when we see George Floyd as our brother, or Breonna as a sister, migrant children as our own sons and daughters—what would we risk?”
Twenty years ago, four days after 9/11, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a family friend of Valarie’s, was the first of many to be murdered in hate violence that swept the nation following the attacks. “My family had lived in America for a century as Sikh farmers. But we automatically became potential terrorists in the eyes of our neighbors.” The racial violence is what propelled her into advocacy. She made documentaries, fought legal cases, and organized in an effort to build a more just society than the one in which she grew up. However, she reached a moment of crisis during the 2016 election season. While she was tucking her son into bed one night, she noticed a breathlessness in her body. Hate crimes and hate speech were on the rise and the work she had been doing for nearly fifteen years began to feel as though it were done in vain.
“Love Outlasts Life”
Like many, Valarie used to roll her eyes upon hearing “Love is the answer.” Part of it, she says, is due to the way America has sensationalized love to mean only a euphoric rush of emotion. This cultural definition excluded the messiness of love and the hard labor of loving others and ourselves, radically and without expectations. As Valarie’s grandfather used to tell her “Love is dangerous business.”
She unpacks her grandpa’s aphorism by saying,
“If I choose to love you, I must let your story into my heart, I must be present to your grief, I must stand up for you when you’re in harm’s way. What happens when we see George Floyd as our brother, or Breonna as a sister, migrant children as our own sons and daughters—what would we risk?”
Twenty years ago, four days after 9/11, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a family friend of Valarie’s, was the first of many to be murdered in hate violence that swept the nation following the attacks. “My family had lived in America for a century as Sikh farmers. But we automatically became potential terrorists in the eyes of our neighbors.” The racial violence is what propelled her into advocacy. She made documentaries, fought legal cases, and organized in an effort to build a more just society than the one in which she grew up. However, she reached a moment of crisis during the 2016 election season. While she was tucking her son into bed one night, she noticed a breathlessness in her body. Hate crimes and hate speech were on the rise and the work she had been doing for nearly fifteen years began to feel as though it were done in vain.
“If I see you that way, with love, I must let your grief into my heart, your story into my heart, I must stand up for you when you’re in harm’s way. What happens when we see George Floyd as our brother, or Breonna as a sister, migrant children as our own sons and daughters—what would we risk?”
“With every film, with every campaign, with every lawsuit, I thought we were making the world safer for the next generation. Now I had to reckon with the fact that my son—a little brown boy who keeps his hair long as part of our faith—was growing up in a nation more dangerous for him than it was for me. I thought to myself, ‘How do we last when the labor for justice is this long and hard? What really makes a difference?’ I looked to the communities I served. Lasting change only took hold when I saw what can only be described as revolutionary love.”
This is when the eye-roll was recast as an embrace. In 2017, Valarie delivered a TED Talk titled “3 Lessons of Revolutionary Love in a Time of Rage,” where she reclaimed love as a revolutionary force in our lives. She wrote See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, now an LA Times Bestseller. As the movement grew, she founded the Revolutionary Love Project, which holds a wealth of information and tools for those seeking to build communities rooted in antiracism. One of those tools is the Revolutionary Love Compass. It breaks down different directions of love—towards others, our opponents, and ourselves—and how to make use of the emotions felt in those practices. As Valarie says, the compass “makes room for the most intimate energies moving inside of us.” She described the work of revolutionary love as labor. A process that encourages us to breathe when we feel breathless, so we can feel energized to push forward the change we want to see.
“With every film, with every campaign, with every lawsuit, I thought we were making the world safer for the next generation. Now I had to reckon with the fact that my son—a little brown boy who keeps his hair long as part of our faith—was growing up in a nation more dangerous for him than it was for me. I thought to myself, ‘How do we last when the labor for justice is this long and hard? What really makes a difference?’ I looked to the communities I served. Lasting change only took hold when I saw what can only be described as revolutionary love.”
This is when the eye-roll was recast as an embrace. In 2017, Valarie delivered a TED Talk titled “3 Lessons of Revolutionary Love in a Time of Rage,” where she reclaimed love as a revolutionary force in our lives. She wrote See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, now an LA Times Bestseller. As the movement grew, she founded the Revolutionary Love Project, which holds a wealth of information and tools for those seeking to build communities rooted in antiracism. One of those tools is the Revolutionary Love Compass. It breaks down different directions of love—towards others, our opponents, and ourselves—and how to make use of the emotions felt in those practices. As Valarie says, the compass “makes room for the most intimate energies moving inside of us.” She described the work of revolutionary love as labor. A process that encourages us to breathe when we feel breathless, so we can feel energized to push forward the change we want to see.
“Love is sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, life-giving, a choice we make. It contains the whole spectrum of human emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Rage, our anger, is the force we harness to protect that which we love. When we choose to love beyond what evolution requires, that’s Revolutionary Love. So when I began to see love as labor, I wondered, ‘How did our ancestors show up with love, how did they grieve, how did they rage, how did they breathe?’ I charted those practices to build the Revolutionary Love Compass."
“Between the pandemic, the racial reckoning, and climate catastrophe, the only way I can find the courage to take the next breath is to know that I’m not alone. When I draw on the memory of ancestors who have gone through fires before, I imagine them behind me whispering in my ear, “You are brave.” It gives me the ability to take the next breath.”
This idea of summoning ancestors is more accessible than one would think. Valarie channels the energy of her grandfather, a biological ancestor, but she also sits at the feet of Black thinkers like Dr. King, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks.
This idea of summoning ancestors is more accessible than one would think. Valarie channels the energy of her grandfather, a biological ancestor, but she also sits at the feet of Black thinkers like Dr. King, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks.
“I used to think that what my community has survived the last twenty years since 9/11—the hate violence and state violence—was especially brutal. But when I began to really understand genocide and slavery, I realized that our story is not an aberration, but a continuation of what people of color have long fought on this soil. I look to Black voices in history for guidance, and I believe we all can. Black women, in particular, taught me that loving myself and my family was a revolutionary act.
“It’s Black and Indigenous mothers who have long known what it’s like to bring their children into a hostile world. We cannot protect our babies from white supremacist violence, but we can give them the tools to be brave in the face of it. My son heard his first racial slur at the age of four. For all my activism—I can’t protect my son in the schoolyard. But I can give him tools our ancestors had, to know that he is worthy, that he is beloved, to feel his own dignity, to not let any person diminish his soul so much as to make him hate them. At night, I tell him bedtime stories of people through history who stood with love—love for others, and love for themselves.”
Valarie emphasizes the importance of not canonizing our idols, to instead see them for both the work they progressed as well as their imperfections.
“As soon as we put people up on pedestals and make them into saints, we sap them of all their power. It’s so easy to say ‘Well, they were saints. They were superhuman. That means I don’t have to try and be like them.’ What does it mean to see them in their messiness and faults? We can begin to acknowledge our own vulnerabilities and faults and say ‘I too am worthy enough to be able to show up and live a life dedicated to love.’”
Valarie emphasizes the importance of not canonizing our idols, to instead see them for both the work they progressed as well as their imperfections.
“As soon as we put people up on pedestals and make them into saints, we sap them of all their power. It’s so easy to say ‘Well, they were saints. They were superhuman. That means I don’t have to try and be like them.’ What does it mean to see them in their messiness and faults? We can begin to acknowledge our own vulnerabilities and faults and say ‘I too am worthy enough to be able to show up and live a life dedicated to love.’”
At the core of the Revolutionary Love Project’s ethos is the invitation to “see no stranger”. It is a message upheld in the Sikh faith, “I see no stranger, I see no enemy. Wherever I look, Oneness is all I see.” It communicates that we are all linked, that the way we show up for ourselves and others is both self-preserving and selfless. That both truths can exist in harmony.
“Indigenous wisdom across different cultures share a stunning insight into our interconnectedness. You can look upon the face of anyone and say, ‘You are a part of me that I do not yet know.’ It is a cosmological and biological fact, as well as a soaring spiritual truth. You don’t have to become an activist to live this truth. I’m inviting people into a way of being, right where they are. A way of seeing that leaves no one behind.
“As soon as we put people up on pedestals and make them into saints, we sap them of all their power. It’s so easy to say ‘Well, they were saints. They were superhuman. That means I don’t have to try and be like them.’ What does it mean to see them in their messiness and faults? We can begin to acknowledge our own vulnerabilities and faults and say ‘I too am worthy enough to be able to show up and live a life dedicated to love.’”
This aspect of TikTok is one that puts a smile on Sera’s face as she talks about it. She appreciates that the platform works with the user to offer a feed that will generate joy and connect them with like-minded content.
As her career has progressed, Sera has adopted a form of living that doesn’t rely on long-term planning and, for her, it has made all the difference.
“I used to plan things heavily in advance because I’m such a perfectionist. But nowadays, it’s liberating to not have a 5-year plan. The pandemic was a great example of how sometimes things don’t go the way we expect them to and, often, the opportunity you weren't expecting is even better than the one you thought you wanted. So, it’s good to have an idea of who you are, what your core values are, and to have some sort of compass, but life happens when you’re busy making other plans. If you have a short-term vision that makes you happy, you know, just do that. Worry about the next thing when that time comes. I wasn’t always able to do that, but now that I’m trying to be in the moment, things feel more optimistic.”
To keep up with Sera's work, follow her on LinkedIn here.
“As soon as we put people up on pedestals and make them into saints, we sap them of all their power. It’s so easy to say ‘Well, they were saints. They were superhuman. That means I don’t have to try and be like them.’ What does it mean to see them in their messiness and faults? We can begin to acknowledge our own vulnerabilities and faults and say ‘I too am worthy enough to be able to show up and live a life dedicated to love.’”
At the core of the Revolutionary Love Project’s ethos is the invitation to “see no stranger”. It is a message upheld in the Sikh faith, “I see no stranger, I see no enemy. Wherever I look, Oneness is all I see.” It communicates that we are all linked, that the way we show up for ourselves and others is both self-preserving and selfless. That both truths can exist in harmony.
“Indigenous wisdom across different cultures share a stunning insight into our interconnectedness. You can look upon the face of anyone and say, ‘You are a part of me that I do not yet know.’ It is a cosmological and biological fact, as well as a soaring spiritual truth. You don’t have to become an activist to live this truth. I’m inviting people into a way of being, right where they are. A way of seeing that leaves no one behind.
“I believe revolutions happen not only in big grand public moments but in spaces where people are coming together to inhabit a new way of being. That’s my role now—to inspire and equip people to make revolutionary love the compass of their lives and communities. Now that I’ve found revolutionary love, it’s the song I’ll be singing for the rest of my life.”
To keep up with Valarie's work, follow her on IG @valariekaur and check out the Revolutionary Love Project here.
The photographer for this shoot was Jiro Schneider, keep up with his work on IG @jiro_sc and check out his site.
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