To start off this project I’ve collected a series of 16 images of random patterns I’ve seen everywhere I go. Documenting this has opened my eyes as to where I can be exploring for these kinds of things and how much this topic relates to the world around me on a daily basis.
This project has been really slowly progressing so far. Today I finally decided on a public concern to focus on and bring awareness to, through pattern. I was watching one of the music videos of a musician I really like, called Isaiah Rashad ‘4r Da Squaw’. In this music video he is seen with his son on a pier by the beach. The one thing that stuck out in this music video was the fact that every single person has a bank balance above their head, with the green representing positive balances and the red representing negative balances.
This music video really inspired the topic I chose for this brief, it almost acted as a catalyst for a whole new thought process. This was the perfecting moving image representing the categorisation of human beings at its finest, assuming their bank balance without knowing anything about them, judging purely on the visual.
I wanted to tie in this issue with racism, because they are both such prominent problems within society. There is a long history of these 2 elements tying in together along history, such as with slavery. This was a time when anyone who has a darker skin color was treated as though they were not human.
Even today, wealth still plays a very large role in racial profiling, it is not because a black person is wealthy or successful that they will stop being discriminated against.
Despite us having come very far from times when people of darker skin color were treated like animals, still today it is very obviously an issue deeply embedded in our society. People of color still do not have the same opportunities as white people when it comes to many aspects of life.
Sources
http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/14/news/economy/wealthy-blacks-racial-profiling/index.html
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-economic-racism-20160711-snap-story.html
https://www.thoughtco.com/acial-wealth-gap-3026683
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-inequality/
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