“The two voices - the little critic and the wise woman in me - had been in a power struggle for all of my life. “He projected the woman warrior in me,” she says, pointing to a painting of the first Sikh woman warrior behind her. She credits her grandfather for helping her. What it feels like, this voice: ‘You’re not smart enough, you’re not strong enough, you’re not beautiful enough, you’re not white enough, you’re not fair enough, you’re not good enough. “That’s when I started hearing a voice in my head, they call it internalized oppression. It was as if I was seeing myself through the eyes of (that) boy,” she reveals. “‘Get up, you black dog.’ I didn’t respond with anger. Kaur heard her first racial slur when she was just 6 years old, in the school yard. ‘Revolutionary love’ is the choice to labor for others, for our opponents and ourselves.” Raising Sikh children in America “I learned from her that love is sweet labor. “She was feeding her baby, as I was feeding mine,” Kaur explains. Kaur had her own revelation about love when she had her son - not just because she birthed an actual human, but because her mother was by her side, cooking food and bringing it to the hospital.

“The problem is not with love, it’s the way we talk about it in our country.” If you find yourself wanting to dismiss the word, Kaur explains why. “Anytime I had seen change, it wasn’t our lawsuits and campaigns alone that helped, but lasting change happened…when people rose up in solidarity and approached the fight for social justice from a place of love.” There it is again. “I tie his hair up in a juda, send him off to school, knowing he’s growing up in a nation more dangerous for him, as a little Sikh boy, than it was for me.”Īfter this realization, she left her job at Stanford Law. Kaur had just become a new mother.She shares what would become a typical morning for her and her young son. A post shared by Valarie Kaur 2016, a reckoning of sorts happened for Kaur and America, when Donald Trump became President.

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