See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

Kaur emphasizes the value of grieving communally to heal from losses stemming from racism. Kaur picks up her story at Stanford University, where she pursued studies in “philosophy, religion, and international relations” (34). This led to Kaur becoming drawn to oral history and the stories of survivors.

During her junior year of college, 9/11 changed everything. Kaur emphasized how the media repeatedly showed the Twin Towers collapsing, and these recordings shortly thereafter became intermixed with images of a Saudi man wearing a turban: Osama bin Laden. Kaur notes the immediate impact it had on the Sikh community: “Our nation’s new enemy looked like my family. The violence was instant” (35). She recounts the racist violence that grew out of decisions made by post-9/11 America, including murders, beatings, stabbings, and the burning of places of worship. She notes, however, that these events weren’t portrayed on television. Instead, she received the news of these racist acts online. She acknowledges that the experience of South Asian and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) American communities wasn’t sufficiently addressed by the media or the government. On September 15, a close family friend of Kaur’s, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was murdered in a hate crime. This event and others like it continued to receive little media attention.

When Stanford University canceled Kaur’s research trip to Punjab, India, she shifted her research focus and proposed traveling around the United States gathering stories of those affected by post-9/11 hate crimes. With her cousin Sonny acting as a cameraman, Kaur began documenting the fallout. She gathered the stories of individuals like Navinderdeep Nijher, who became afraid to leave his home for weeks after serving as one of the first doctors at Ground Zero because of the severity of the racial slurs he was called in public. Sher Singh was arrested on a train after someone anonymously reported him as looking suspicious. Attar Singh, a Sikh grandfather, was beaten with baseball bats and shot with paintballs. He died only months after the interview. Swaran Bhullar, a Sikh store owner, was cut with a knife across her scalp. Kaur also interviewed Sikh children who were bullied in school. Kaur reports, “The most consistent and immediate targets for hate were Sikh Americans—the only people in the United States who wear turbans not as optional cultural garb but as a part of our faith, an extension of our bodies” (42).

Both Kaur and her cousin often cried with those who were being harmed because of these crimes. Kaur describes the real work of the project as grieving with those who experienced harm and hate because in grieving with them, she displayed love for them. In all the stories she listened to, she found the most difficult part was people trying to understand why these events had happened to them. Kaur asserts that as Sikh Americans suffered, America asserted its goodness and the justness of its post-9/11 decisions. America did not recognize the Sikh community’s grief.

Kaur returned to the site of Uncle Balbir’s murder many times. For her, Balbir’s gas station came to stand for all the people who died after 9/11 due to hate crimes or the War on Terror. With the last of her research grant, Kaur traveled to India to interview Uncle Balbir’s widow, Joginder Kaur. In her interview, Kaur concluded that Joginder found some respite in people’s willingness to grieve with her.

After Uncle Balbir’s murder, hundreds visited the gas station and left notes and flowers in response to the hate crime. Thousands of people from many different religions also came to his memorial. Joginder expressed gratitude for the Americans who came to mourn with her and show her love. Kaur concludes that people must mourn hate crimes together, even for people they do not know. She says that this type of grieving is revolutionary.

Kaur recounts Papa Ji’s immigration to the United States; he was imprisoned for four months upon his arrival, even though he had an official passport. The US Immigration Commission planned to deport him because, due to prejudice against Asian immigrants, it believed he would become a dependent of the state. An immigration lawyer, Henry Marshall, set him free by filing a writ of habeas corpus. Papa Ji found work as a farmhand and slept in barns at first. In 1946, he was allowed to become a citizen thanks to the Luce-Celler Act. He helped found the first Sikh gurdwara and worked to set India free from the British Empire.

In the present, post-9/11 hate crimes continue to target the Sikh community. Kaur, in particular, is impacted by the murder of Sukhpal Sohdi, Uncle Balbir’s brother. Shot in the neck while driving a taxi, Sukhpal Sohdi crashed and died. Rana Sodhi, the surviving brother, felt that while Balbir became a martyr, Sukhpal’s death was meaningless. There were no suspects, and no crowd came to grieve his death.

Kaur had a romantic relationship with Ram Singh, a Sikh medical student. They bonded over shared culture, and she felt accepted by his family. Ram, however, was continuously on the receiving end of racial slurs because he wore a turban and had brown skin. This angered him, and Ram began to constantly criticize Kaur. He began pausing their relationship as he chose, and Kaur accepted this behavior. Kaur performed in The Vagina Monologues on campus, and it helped her see the negative view she had of her own body, mainly because of Ram’s criticism. Everyone was proud of her performance except for Ram, who believed the play had inappropriate cultural commentary and lacked respect for men. Ram’s criticism of her decisions and body continued, but she stayed with him, not fighting back.

Nationally, America was preparing to invade Iraq, a war Kaur viewed as senseless. Around the same time, she saw an actor perform Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, and it resonated strongly with her. After this speech, she gained a “sense of agency” and realized she must fight against the injustices in the world (76). She and her friend, Brynn, committed to this mission. Kaur attended a protest on March 5 against the invasion of Iraq. She was handed a mic and began sharing stories about the hate crimes that followed 9/11. She expressed her fear that hate against the Sikh and Muslim communities would continue as a result of the Iraq War.

Kaur concludes that hate crimes against turban-wearing Americans have not subsided because the nation continued to build fear through acts such as invading Iraq, as well as through media, which continued to display the “brown, turbaned” man as a terrorist. She notes that over 1,200 Arabs and Muslims were detained and questioned over a period of two months. The Alien Absconder Initiative later led to the arrest of 1,000 individuals, none of whom were found guilty of terrorism, though at least two-thirds of them were deported from the US. Another 84,000 were deported through the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, none of whom were found guilty of terrorism. At the same time, under the Patriot Act, Muslims and other immigrants lost their right to privacy and were placed under surveillance. Again, none of these individuals were found guilty of terrorism. Kaur asserts that this type of “[p]rofiling by the government signals to the public whom they should fear, and in turn the public’s fear pressures the government to profile” (80). As such, the actions of the government directly affected the behavior of citizens. The US also began using the Guantanamo Bay military base to imprison and torture individuals as they pursued the War on Terror. The US argued these individuals did not have constitutional rights because they weren’t on US soil.

Kaur trained to become a legal observer at protests. She learned skills to placate protestors in case of arrest and communicate effectively with the police. Kaur attended a protest against the Iraq War in San Francisco with her friends, Shannon and Jess. They blocked traffic, and she was arrested, given a citation for blocking traffic, and released. She returned to the protest and interceded to keep the protestors safe by singing to them through a megaphone. It calms them and she effectively stops their arrest. She repeated this strategy up and down the street. Ram was ashamed of her participation in the protests. Kaur admits that she did not understand the danger she could have experienced on this day. She hints at another time when she experienced police brutality.

During Bush’s presidency, anti-Muslim propaganda continued to be produced, and policies were changed to make it easier to observe, question, imprison, or deport Southwest Asian and North African and South Asian individuals. One of Kaur’s professors approached her and said she should attend law school for her own protection as a protestor and a woman of color. Kaur realized there was a warrior inside of her who was prepared to wage war on the nation’s laws. The same professor also told her that she needed a man in her life who supported her, not one who demeaned her. She called Ram’s father to tell him she would not be visiting for the holiday season, and he told her he knew she was not happy with Ram and that she should move on. Kaur wrote Ram a letter ending their relationship.