Ran 2.23 miles today for Ahmaud Arbery this morning. All the while thinking of the racist history and local categorisation practices that led to him being shot whilst jogging in his neighbourhood. A number of connections came to mind... #IrunwithMaud

The first, and I guess, most striking was the opening of Anderson’s ‘Iconic Ghetto’. Anderson was also out jogging, minding his own, when a man, in a truck, pulls over. “GO HOME” shouts the man...

Anderson thinks on this encounter and comes to realise the man meant to ‘the ghetto’, the stigmatised socio-spatial category where the black body ‘belongs’. In this way, I was also thinking of the occasions where Sacks discusses perception and inference...

In a number of lectures he discusses how racism can be a product of people’s ‘routine procedures’. How incongruities are done and how categories ‘permit you to see’. Interestingly, he talks about ‘white’ and ‘black’ as an example of a ‘two-set class’...

Along with others like ‘rich/poor’, ‘male/female’, and so on, he noted that they seem to be a powerful way of ‘doing social control’. This linked to his remarks on categories and actions as viewed relationally and as inference-rich is significant...

Long story short, if that’s me jogging, I don’t get told to ‘go home’ and I don’t get shot. But, of course, there are other resonances with that ‘go home’ and how it’s both *ocassioned* and *heard*. We’ve had the various, excellent, writings on the Govt’s ‘go home’ vans...

Where is *home* other than ‘not here’? Who hears this as ‘maybe they mean me?’ And then, most recently the ‘stay (the fuck) at home’ campaign, so well critiqued by @Des_Fitzgerald, here; http://somatosphere.net/2020/stay-the-fuck-at-home.html/

Yesterday the ‘stay at home’ message, and the politics of domestic bordering entwined in that, were replaced with the warning to ‘stay alert’...

Given the examples in this thread alone, coupled with the invocation of the racialised imagery of the virus-as-mugger (see, of course, Stuart Hall), one wonders what ‘the public’ are being asked to vigilant of, and consequence.

*and to what consequence.