The colour lines of settler colonialism

Colour has been important to the thinking and practice of Western settler colonialism since the mid-sixteenth century. Since the emerging dominance of modernity, and within the expanding perimeter of the colonial enterprise, human communities in European and overseas territories have been portrayed geometrically, chronologically and visibly through colour. Colour has been the cipher of colonial diversity. Whether or not a correspondence exists with real phenotypic characteristics, colour has signified a set of characteristics that has codified diversity, including un-humanness and inferiority, within a broader system of knowledge that assigned full human standing and superiority solely to the colonizers.