The racialisation of bodies as ‘black’ vs ‘white’ is a method of ordering used by colonial and imperial regimes, most relevant to my research the British empire, to make sense of cultures it could not understand, subsequently positioning them as less than. Noticing and interrogating patterns of exclusion, erasure and appropriation born from this symbolic hijacking of colour is key to black diasporic experiences. I propose pattern recognition is a form of play, key to black diasporic art practice of transforming their experiences into artistic expression.
