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I gave Greg a hard time about printing a black and white document to the color printer in the office today. Why print that to the color printer? We have two others lined up directly next to it expressly intended for printing in black and white. I’m no conservationist, especially when it comes to ink, but even to me that seemed wasteful. He turned around and said, “It doesn’t matter – black isn’t even a color.”
I felt like I had been slapped in the fucking mouth.
“What are you talking about?” I said. Black is a fucking color – Darth Vader’s helmet? Tires? Black bears? Black beans? Blackbeard?!? Quit flipping my goddamn world upside down, dude!
“Black is not a color,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Look it up, bro-ski.”
I pointed at a keyboard I had until then believed was black. “What’s that, then? Is that not black?”
He stared. “Look. It. Up.”
I did. Wikipedia, shining beacon of knowledge and cliff notes to the entire world (wouldn’t that be a good slogan for Wikipedia?), told me that black is a color: “Black is the color of objects that do not emit or reflect light in any part of the visible spectrum; they absorb all such frequencies of light.”
I quoted this to Greg, and he cocked his head to one side chidingly. “Seriously? Anyone could’ve wrote that – Wikipedia can be written by any idiot.” Granted, Wikipedia is a user-edited encyclopedia, but it’s also a moderated user-edited encyclopedia – I know plenty of people who’ve tried to replace Wikipedia entries on a variety of subjects with dick jokes and swear words , and every time it seems to me that within a few hours those entries are changed back to normal. There’s someone keeping an eye on what people are putting in there. I tried explaining this to Greg. He shook his head.
“Whatever, dude – just accept it. It’s not a color.”
I was left frustrated both by his insistence on arguing something like this without any supporting evidence whatsoever and by the implied question that his point, if correct, raised: what is black?
I realize this belongs in the long, sad list of things a stoner wonders about while high, next to ponderings like “Hey, what’s with my hand?” and “Maybe the pot is smoking me, man,” but I’m really troubled. What do you call black? It’s not a color? Fine, then explain to me how to re-form this sentence: “That lump of coal is the color black.” What do you do? That lump of coal is the absence of color?
That’s what Marissa said to me, that black is the absence of color. This doesn’t seem to answer the essential quandary here, which has more to do with the composition of a color, the why it appears a certain way then whether or not it is a color. I understand that the way you perceive a color has to do with the way that the particular surface absorbs or reflects light, but isn’t a color just our perception of that interaction in the first place? That is to say – how does it matter if there’s no light being absorbed or present? The point is that we’re perceiving that interaction, regardless of how limited the interaction is, right?
I’m really just clawing at semantics, obviously, because none of this is important. Here’s why:
1) I’m right – no one else is.
2) The more important question is this: why do I have enough time to be looking up the color black, our perception of the color black, color theory (really, I did), and polling my friends and loved ones as to whether or not black is a fucking color?



