![]() For Sikh and Muslim Americans today are still seen as terrorists. There were no bystanders who spoke up then.Īnd I’ve had to reckon with the fact that there will be moments on the street or in the schoolyard when I will not be able to protect my son. There were a crowd of people who watched, who saw, but no one said anything.” Just like last time when my father was walking on a beach with a baby carrier, with my son at his side, and someone called him a suicide bomber. “Didn’t anyone say anything?” I asked them. When they came home, my parents were shaken. “Go back to the country you came from.” My father was hard of hearing, so my 4-year-old son had to tell my father what the mean lady said. I mean, he was… Ahh, his childhood has been magical. My son was sitting on my father’s shoulders, on top of the world, and they were going to grab a ride on a ferry-across the marina to come back home. Just a few weeks ago, my son was coming home with my father and my mother from a summer concert. And hate crimes have skyrocketed once again.īut now, now I am a mother. Executive orders and policies rain down on us every day so that it becomes difficult to breathe. ![]() VK: Fast forward to present day…White nationalists declare this presidency as their great awakening. Valarie Kaur spoke at a Bioneers conference. But then she saw that a dark wind was blowing harder and harder across the increasingly dis-United States. She believed that each film and each new campaign would make the nation safer for the next generation. She began working with other brown and black communities across the United States, sometimes while the blood was still wet on the ground. She soon realized that her community’s struggle was part of something much larger. HOST: After 9/11, Valarie Kaur joined with her community of Sikh and Muslim Americans to respond to the climate of fear and bigotry that branded them as the enemy. And his murder-I mean, I was going to be an academic. The first person killed in a hate crime after 9/11 was Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh father who was killed in front of his store in Mesa, Arizona by a man who called himself a patriot. VALARIE KAUR: So my story begins in the aftermath of September 11 th, in the wake of the horror of those attacks, when hate violence erupted on city streets across the country. Welcome to The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature. This is “Laboring for Justice: See No Stranger.” I’m Neil Harvey. In the lineage of the visionary nonviolent change-makers across history, she came to understand that movements must be grounded in an ethic of love. In the course of her journey, she experienced a revelation that led her to found the Revolutionary Love Project – a journey she shares in her soulful book titled “See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love”. She emerged as an award-winning scholar and educator, gaining multiple degrees in international relations, media, and religious studies from schools including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. She became a highly influential faith leader in the Sikh community and on the national stage. She went on to become a lawyer, filmmaker, innovator and activist in the face of a society increasingly divided by “othering” – by the scapegoating and dehumanizing of marginalized people and communities. She began documenting hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans, which resulted in her first film, the award-winning Divided We Fall. When a family friend – a Sikh-American father – was murdered after 9/11, her life changed forever. NEIL HARVEY, HOST: Valerie Kaur was born and raised in Clovis, California, where her family had settled as farmers in 1913 and practiced Sikhism, a religion that originated in India.
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