Freedom Rising

The Middle Project

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What Does Revolutionary Love Look Like? (part 1)

In December of 2015, Valarie Kaur, a Sikh activist, interfaith leader, and filmmaker, boarded her flight to return home to her one-year-old son. She was tweeting condolences for those killed or injured in the San Bernardino shooting.

The passenger behind her noticed the breast pump in her carry on and alerted the flight attendants. He thought it was a bomb. Valarie had to open up her bags to prove that she was a mother and not a terrorist.

“The hot winds of the world are raging around us,” says Valarie. “But the hot winds cannot touch you when you lead with love."

This is the game we are playing: a game of love or hate, a game of life or death, a game of liberation or oppression. And this game of love, Valarie reminds us, is not safe. “The game of love is not comfortable. The game of love is dangerous business, it means facing the hot winds of the world with a saint’s eye and a warrior’s heart."

Because the way we make a change is just as important as the change that we make. And when we share a moral imperative to end hate and racism in America, we will only make this change by working together in a multicultural, multi-faith embodiment of Revolutionary Love.


Valarie Kaur is an award-winning filmmaker, civil rights lawyer, and interfaith leader who centers her work around the power of storytelling. She is the founding director of Groundswell at Auburn Seminary, a non-profit initiative with 80,000 members that mobilizes people of faith for social change. She has led national campaigns responding to hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, and solitary confinement. She is a frequent political contributor on MSNBC, and her essays appear regularly on CNN, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post. Kaur earned degrees from Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School, where she founded the Yale Visual Law Project to train students in the art of storytelling for social change. A third-generation Sikh American, Kaur is from Clovis, California where her family settled as Punjabi farmers in 1913. She lives in Los Angeles with her filmmaking partner and husband Sharat Raju.