For Valarie Kaur, love is sweet labor

When I settle into my cozy reading nook, I am never alone. These days I am surrounded by my children, who always seem to be home. I am also hemmed in by a herd of elephants in the room: the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, and the frayed state of American democracy, to name a few. I picked up See No Stranger at a time when these children and these elephants were trumpeting so loudly I could barely hear myself think. It seems a small miracle that Valarie Kaur’s quiet yet commanding voice cut through the cacophony.

Kaur has been formed by many experiences. She is a Sikh whose family has farmed in California for more than 100 years. She is a Yale-educated lawyer with a master’s degree in theology from Harvard Divinity School. She is a survivor of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. She is a filmmaker, a feminist, a writer, a speaker, and a mother. These disparate threads are fused together in her core identity and vocation: Kaur is an activist who has lent her presence, time, and voice to nearly every major progressive movement of the past 20 years.

She has spent her days honoring the victims of hate crimes, fighting for prison reform, protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the injustices of Guantánamo Bay, exposing police brutality and racial profiling, advocating for immigrants’ rights, and campaigning for Barack Obama (whose administration later disappointed her). This is an incomplete inventory; the array of causes with which she has aligned herself is dizzying. As one who has been quickly worn out by my own brief forays into advocacy and activism, I found myself truly astonished by Kaur’s endurance. She is a tireless and unapologetic social justice warrior in a world that has rendered that phrase a slur.