## Metadata - Author: [[Valarie Kaur]] - Full Title: See No Stranger - Category: #books ## Highlights - “Revolutionary love” is the choice to labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. It begins with wonder: You are a part of me I do not yet know. It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political, sustained by joy. Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YK1T4FN&location=232)) - Wonder is our birthright. It comes easily in childhood—the feeling of watching dust motes dancing in sunlight, or climbing a tree to touch the sky, or falling asleep thinking about where the universe ends. If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the people in our lives, too—their thoughts and experiences, their pain and joy, their wants and needs. We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them. Wonder is the wellspring for love. ([Location 329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YK1T4FN&location=329)) - The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, Mirabai to love without limit. They all expanded the circle of who counts as one of us, and therefore who is worthy of our care and concern. These teachings were rooted in the linguistic, cultural, and spiritual contexts of their time, but they spoke of a common vision of our interconnectedness and interdependence. It is the ancient Sanskrit truth that we can look upon anyone or anything and say: Tat tvam asi, “I am that.” It is the African philosophy: Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” It is the Mayan precept: In La’Kech, “You are my other me.” What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know. ([Location 337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YK1T4FN&location=337)) - The Sikh ideal was the sant-sipahi, the warrior-sage. The warrior fights. The sage loves. It was a path of revolutionary love. Papa Ji was my warrior-sage: He went into the fires of this world with the eyes of a sage and the heart of a warrior. He was teaching me how to reclaim our warrior tradition for courageous nonviolent action, here and now. ([Location 405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YK1T4FN&location=405)) - My family had lived in the United States for a century but Sikh Americans still had no place in the nation’s racial imagination, which meant that I was illegible, unable to be read except by negation: not Native American, not Hindu, not monkey-brains eating. I had fallen for the great bribe of white supremacy: the promise of acceptance for people of color who put down other people of color. ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YK1T4FN&location=417)) - Our minds are primed to see the world in terms of us and them. We can’t help it. The moment we look upon another person’s face, our minds discern in an instant whether or not they are one of us—part of our family or community or country—or one of them. This happens before conscious thought. Our bodies release hormones that prime us to trust and listen to those we see as part of us and to fear and resent them. It is easier to feel empathy and compassion for one of us, much harder for one of them. When one of us does something bad, we tend to attribute it to circumstance, but when one of them does the same, we attribute it to essence—Oh, that’s just how they are. We think of us as complex and multidimensional; we tend to think of them as simple and one-dimensional. We are much more likely to intervene when we already see a victim of violence as part of us. We tend to stand by when people we see as them are harmed, whether by policies of the state or violence on the street. In other words, who we see as one of us determines who we let inside our circle of care and concern. ([Location 433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YK1T4FN&location=433)) - The most powerful force shaping who we see as us and them is the dominant stories in our social landscape. They are produced by ideologies and theologies that divide the world into good or bad, saved or unsaved, with us or against us. Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or not we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others and ourselves. In brain-imaging studies, for example, nearly half of black people, queer people, and women exhibited unconscious fear and distrust in response to pictures of people who looked like them. In other words, we live in a culture that makes us strange to ourselves. ([Location 442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YK1T4FN&location=442)) - In the United States, white supremacy is intertwined with Christian supremacy, one an extension of the other. Any theology that teaches that God will torture the people in front of you in the afterlife creates the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth. ([Location 524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YK1T4FN&location=524))