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“Meditating While Brown?” Part II
As if spending a few hours in a county jail cell for my meditating in honor of fellow citizen’s slain by an assassin’s bullet wasn’t enough, the events of the following days added a bit of insult to injury. Yes injury! The wonderful Pima County Sheriff’s Deputies, in their decision to arouse me from my meditative perch, caused a fair amount of damage to my knees and wrenched my shoulder. Here are pictures of my knees on February 28, 2011, just three days after the arrest, that sustained injuries that were also documented by my physician, who fortunately had just seen me a week or so before for treatment associated with another issue.
But the injury was not the insult alone, what was more of an insult was that, in less than a week from the date of my arrest, a local news station, KGUN 9, chose to take a negative spin on the story and instead of connecting my activity with memorializing the victims as it was intended they fabricated an association with the alleged January 8, 2011 shooter by connecting me to him through my employment at Pima Community College via their website and television broadcasts. So my question to KGUN9 is whose side are they on? Clearly not the yoga practicing community’s! I say this because their reports did not just defame me, a practitioner of yoga for many years, but they also attacked fundamental components of the ancient practice by labeling them as “bizarre” and “unusual” behavior, which to me, a practicing minister, seemed totally appropriate for the context of memorializing victims of a mass shooting at the site where 6 people lost their lives.
In the same week more insult came my way from Pima Community College, the employer for which I taught classes for approximately 9 years, who pulled me from my teaching duties upon learning of incidents associated with my religious expression at the Cases Adobes Safeway. After making a statement that clarified that I had never taught the alleged perpetrator of the January 8, 2011 Shooting and that he was never registered for any of the classes I taught for the college, a statement which I was not allowed to make as dictated by my being a college employee, PCC demanded I submit to a psychological assessment and then refused to allow me back in the classroom, eventually dismissing me from my employment. It appears that someone in the administration felt my religious practice made me “unfit” to teach classes I had taught for the college on multiple occasions.
Many people have accused me of being somewhat naive or ill prepared to think that some, even my employer, would not see what I was doing as crazy or problematic. They have asked me why, as a person of color, didn’t I expect the treatment that I have received or why wasn’t I prepared for people to perceive my expression, which was not traditionally Christian, as a threat? I am really saddened by this question because what it tells me as a social psychologist and as a member of this community that even with all the “together we thrive” rhetoric that has followed this tragedy that the true state of affairs is that we are still divided. We can only be divided if we find it perfectly acceptable that certain members of our community need to have different expectations about how they will be perceived when the are doing the same thing as everyone else and if we also find it perfectly acceptable for them to avoid doing what everyone else does because they are different in some way.
In his speech to the victims at the memorial held here in Tucson on January 13, 2011 shortly after the tragedy, President Obama stated “It’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.” He also charged us to “let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together…making sure we align our values with our actions.”
Having been a resident of Tucson since 1999, it is hard for me to believe that what I have experienced as a result of my attempt to show my community solidarity reflects our values. I can only hope that there are others out there that agree with me, who dream of a community where people don’t have to limit themselves based on the expectation that they will be perceived differently for doing what others are doing or be feared or hated because they are merely being who they are.
Let me know how you feel and what you think.
I have included President Obama’s speech below for all of you who did not hear it or need to hear it again.
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