A few days ago, I received an e-mail of Fali Engineer, a friend from the Houston Lodge of Theosophical Society, with a video-file of a speech by Valarie Kaur. I found the video online at Scroll.in, and it is worth viewing.
“She spoke of the dark times ahead and how instead of leading to despair, this could be an opportunity for change,” it says on her website. And further: “This speech was actually the message of the Revolutionary Love Project, an initiative she launched in autumn of 2016. This movement and her New Year’s Eve speech, Kaur said, arose from her distress about the increase in hate violence during the US presidential election campaign.”
This moving talk was given on last New Year’s Eve in an African American Church in Washington DC. Though it was helt in the context of the political situation in America, what she is talking about is not an American topic but a universal one – about the basic oneness of humanity and overcoming hate an exclusion.
Valarie Kaur is a powerful woman and a charismatic speaker. Wikipedia says about her that she “is an American documentary filmmaker, a civil rights activist, and a Sikh interfaith leader. After the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, she began to document hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, which resulted in the 2006 documentary Divided We Fall. … Kaur has given speeches at the White House, the Pentagon, and the Parliament of the World’s Religions.”
:: The 6 minute video “Raising a Brown Boy in Today’s America“.
Valarie Kaur [picture from the video (c) Scroll.in]