Sikhs as Implicated Subjects in the United States: A Reflective Essay on Gurmat-Based Interventions in the Movement for Black Lives by Harleen Kaur & prabhdeep singh kehal

Fall 2020
Abstract
As a largely migrant-descendant community in the United States, Sikhs at a national level have
taken on normative frameworks of model minority representation and respectability politics. At
times, this has been posed as a practice in the name of the faith, framing involvement with state
institutions or partisan politics as representative of the framework of Miri-Piri. Meanwhile, Sikhs as
a community have yet to reconcile their experiences as targets of U.S. racism with the U.S.’s
nationalist project based in white supremacist, colonial, and anti-Black structural violence. As such,
this essay offers a critical intervention based in a Gurmat praxis of liberation politics for engaging
with the Movement for Black Lives. We invite Sikhs to shift their investments of social and political
capital by discussing Sikhs’ migrant incorporation within a structural history of U.S. racism and
colonialism. Through reframing Sikh racialization and providing a brief discussion of tangible,
alternative ways to invest efforts in the Movement for Black Lives, this essay invites Sikhs to
reinvest in Gurmat and Miri-Piri as frameworks to guide a Sikh activism that is committed to a form
of embodied justice against state repression and exploitation.

Keywords: racecraft, praxis, Miri-Piri, Black liberation, implicated subjects

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Harleen Kaur
PhD Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles


prabhdeep singh kehal
PhD Candidate, Brown University

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