Not to take away from the message, but this reminded me of something I thought of as I was reading tweets of people complaining that they were being profiled if they looked like a protestor.
A lot of the twitter chatter mentioned dirty, filthy, scruffy, pierced, tattooed, body odor, bad breath, etc. One twitterer encouraged people to "be smart. Look respectable. Get rid of the piercings, hide the tats."
It reminded me of a conversation we had here long ago, on the process of racialization, how social antagonism constantly generates this sort of marking of the body, attempting to give these marks significance, to see to it that they are read one way. Angela M had a great post analyzing how class was racialized this way. It occurred to me that, if this were war, you'd see this kind of marking of the bodies of the enemy capital wants to put down.
The language of disease, health, filth, safety, sanitation and the need to *clean* the parks was especially, uh, interesting.
This jumped out at me when I saw clips of O'Reilly who was on about needles, drugs, sex, sickness, mental illness, etc. - as if he were defining the vermin that needed to be exterminated. you can also see it in tweets from conservatives who oppose Occupy. They focus on the filth and the deviant bodies.
And yes, with Angela, I think it's interesting to see the way what a person does to their body - hair, clothes, piercings, tats - is an integral part of this. Normally, we think of racialization involving specific features we think of as part of the *body* - hair, eyes, skin. But watching this racialization happening now, it's utter arbitrariness, sheds light on the process - on racialization as process.
shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)