![]() ![]() Valarie had a revelation: to combat racism, nationalism and hate, we cannot succumb to rage ourselves or we have already lost. ![]() ![]() I encourage you, if you are as moved by Valarie as I am, go visit and sign up, because there’s a book coming. She founded the Revolution Love Project, a national initiative which uses a wide range of communication and mobilization tools to equip and inspire people to practice the ethic of love. The second thing that dazzles me about Valarie is that after spending much of her life combatting horrific injustice and intolerance, having been inside supermax prisons, at Guantanamo and at sites of hate crimes and mass shootings, she emerged not as an embittered cynic, but as an apostle of love as the ultimate source of social action. Born and raised in Clovis, California, where her family settled as Sikh farmers in 1913, she is someone with literally deep roots in the American earth, but when a close friend of hers was the first person killed in a hate crime after September 11th, 2001, she began to document hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans, which resulted in her first film, the award-winning Divided We Fall, and helped launch her life of civic engagement. Valarie’s personal story helps explain her drive to remedy wrongs. Her many films include Divided We Fall Stigma, about the impact of police stop-and-frisk policies Alien Nation, about immigration raids The Worst of the Worst, about solitary confinement in prison and Oak Creek: In Memoriam, about an infamous mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. An award-winning scholar and educator with multiple degrees from such schools as Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, including in law, international relations, media, and religious studies, she has become one of the most important voices to emerge from the American Sikh community, and a highly influential faith leader on the national stage, including as the founder of the Groundswell movement, which is considered America’s largest multi-faith online organizing network.Ī film and media maker with deep expertise in building story-based campaigns to advance human rights movements, she founded the Yale Visual Law Project, where she taught students how to make films for social change, and co-founded Faithful Internet to build the movement for net neutrality. An attorney who, in her youth, clerked on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and served as a legal observer at Guantanamo Bay, she has worked as both a lawyer and an activist on complex civil rights cases, hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, gun violence, solitary confinement, marriage equality, and Internet freedom. The first is that for someone still relatively young, she has just about the most varied and extraordinary activist résumé I’ve ever seen. I have sought to bring her here for two years, and I am wowed by her for three reasons. ![]() I find our next speaker to be an astonishing woman. Introduction by Nina Simons, Bioneers co-founder and Chief Relationship Strategist. Read the full verbatim transcript of this keynote talk below. To learn more about Valarie Kaur, visit her website. Valarie Kaur, born into a family of Sikh farmers who settled in California in 1913, is a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, faith leader, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which seeks to champion love as a public ethic and wellspring for social action. We need to reclaim love as a form of sweet labor-fierce, demanding, and life-giving -and draw from the wisdom of the midwife: when in labor, breathe and push! It’s an orientation to life and our movements that harnesses all of the body’s emotions-grief, rage, and joy-and calls us to our highest bravery. The extraordinarily passionate and effective civil rights attorney, faith leader and activist Valarie Kaur shares why she’s convinced that what our times demand is Revolutionary Love. Although we’ve mounted a powerful resistance to tyranny, injustice and violence during the Trump era, with 2020 in sight, we need more than resistance. “Is this the darkness of the tomb – or the darkness of the womb?” asks Valarie Kaur. This keynote talk was given at the 2019 Bioneers Conference. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |