Colours don’t exist. There are no seperate colours; all the colours overlap and blend into each other, making colourist distinctions impossible. How can we possibly say blue and green exist when teal is a combination of both and all three blend into each other? There is only one colour and that is the colour spectrum.
Colour is a purely meaningless social construct. Who gets define what is red and what is orange? Different cultures can’t even agree on whether some colours are distinguishable or not. How can we say colours exist when Japanese people didn’t even distinguish between blue and green until colourist American imperialists forced this distinction on them?
Colourism is not natural. Young children can’t distinguish colour on their own, the social construct of colour has to be taught to them by the colourist system. We can know colour distinction doesn’t matter because different cultures teach their children different colours and spectrums. Colour is an unnatural cultural distinction and not real.
As further evidence for the non-existence of colour, many people can’t physically distinguish between red and green or between blue and yellow. There are even some people can’t see colour at all. If colour is genetically alien to so many people, how can we say it exist?
Even the same person may see colour differently. Why just when making this post on multiple computers, the colour charts have displayed differently on the different screens, and the colours have looked different. Even on the same screen, the colours have looked different depending on whether the colours were against a background that was “white” or “black”. Colour can’t exist if the same person can’t even perceive the same colours as being the same in every possible instance.
The differences between so-called colours is minute. What we call colour is only the 400-800 THz sub-spectrum of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. Compared to the entire ER spectrum, the differences between colours are non-existent. The minute differences between colours pale in comparison to the differences between colour and microwaves. The differences between the various sub-spectrums of electro-magnetic waves is important, but variation within the visible spectrum are so miniscule as to not be worth distinguishing between.
Beyond that, differences in colour have no real impact on our lives. Sure, a red car might, to us, look better than a vomit green car, but that is simply cultural preference, it doesn’t effect how the car performs. In the past, colour might have mattered a little when it may have meant the difference between a nourishing meal or death by poisonous berry, but with modern science we can tell poisonous berries apart without having to use something as primitive as colour. In anything that matters, there is no real difference between colours. All colours are the same.
Most of the variation in colour occurs within colour. If we view the spectrum below, we can see that the variation within blue is far larger the variation between blue and red or blue and green. And if we stop with our imperialist colourism and acknowledge blue and green as being the same colour as many cultures do, almost half the variation of colour exists within grue. There can be no distinction between colours because most colour variation occurs between individual colours within colour groups rather than between different colour groups.
Colour divides us as people. People distinguish themselves by their coloured banners and use different colours to signal in-groups and out-groups, causing violence, hate, colourism, and imperialism. Wars are caused by colourism, as various people march under differently-coloured banners in opposition to those with minor colour differences in their colour banners. We all know how Hitler distinguished his followers by brown shirts and red armbands when he usurped Germany. Then he invaded Europe because their banners were different colours from his red, white, and black banner. Colourism is the cause of so much violence and war in the world, it must be eliminated.
Colour reductionism reduces the great variation among the varying colours destroying diversity. When we call a colour red, we eliminate all the differences between the many diverse shades that brighten up the colour spectrum. This type of colourist colour-typing denies the existence of the varying shades of red and their importance to a diverse colour-spectrum. When we draw a clear, false distinction between red and yellow, we destroy the experience of the colour orange and are all the weaker for it. Instead of engaging in colour reductionism, we need to recognize and celebrate the great diversity of varying shades of colour.
Colour doesn’t exist and colour distinction is nothing more than an unnatural social construct determined by culture and perpetuated by the systemic colourism. Colourism must be eliminated and we must celebrate colour diversity.
Well played. :)
I was going to add that ancient Greeks couldn’t distinguish between blue and purple (hence “Wine-Dark Sea”) until I realised where you were going with it.
Well done. This will be my go-to rebuttal for a lot of arguments.
When I first loaded this page, I got a solid black screen. For a second I wondered if that was deliberate.
I have not thought hard about people that want to deny reality. However this essay is a good counter argument.
It gets worse. Since sight is a mixture of colors, it follows that sight itself is bigoted. People who claim they “see” are really just expressing colorist prejudice.
Since sight is a social construct, it follows that the visible world does not really exist in an objective sense. Reality only exists in the tiny minds of colorist bigots.
Black is the absence of colour, and white is all colours. Technically, you cannot see either white or black, and anyway I am told pure light is invisible to us, so the best white is invisible.
Well done FN, well done.
This is my go to example as well. But you put it better.
Also, color is an illusion, not an inherent property of matter. The “color” something appears depends entirely on the wavelenths of the light bouncing off of it and your ability to process that light, not the thing itself. Change the light shining on an object–make it redder or greener, darker or brighter–and its size and shape do not change, but its color does.
And a rainbow, like a hologram, cannot be touched.
Superb parody. Like suggesting that height doesn’t exist because there is no hard-and-fast line separating “short” from “tall”
L.O.L., Political Correctness really is ridiculous.
You know what, that sounded way less stupid than it was supposed to.
Old zen koan- “Who is the master who makes the grass green?”
The answer, of course, is “I am.”