It's Not All in Black and White!

What do you notice about every word in every book that you have ever read?
Even if you aren't paying attention to it, the words are all black, but the pages are white. Why is that?

A section of The Tale of Desperaux  By: Kate DiCamillo
You can find more about it here

Well I have an idea. In art class when you are drawing, in architecture, interior design, even in writing, what do you always hear about? Contrast, contrast, contrast!

Contrast is what makes things easy to see and read. I guess it makes sense then why every book you have read is written with contrasting colors. But there must be something special about black and white.
If you look at your basic color wheel you can easily see that all of the contrasting colors are opposite each other.

Color Wheel
Photo Courtesy of Five Star Painting

Wait a minute, where is the black and white?!

It turns out that black and white are not on the color wheel because a lot of people don't think that they are colors. I didn't really understand this so I did a bit of research. I found that there is actually some "scientific" debate on whether or not black and white are colors. Depending on what type of scientist is responding, multiple answers are given. For example if you ask experts in the graphic arts industry if black and white are colors, they might respond that since color is generated by light, white will be a color and black will not. This is because black is the thing you get in the absence of light.  If you ask an artist whether or not black and white are colors, they are likely to respond based on their understanding of pigments and you will get the opposite answer because white is the absence of pigments.

I found this new information very interesting...

Questioning whether black and white are even colors strikes me as weird, because black and white are very important to, well, everything.  They are how you get all of the shades, tints and everything in between (Like when you are in the paint store watching them make your paint color, every shade depends on how much black or how much white they add). It seems strange to me that something so important is being debated as to whether or not it is real!
                       
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My love for contrast leads me to deeper thoughts about black and white.  In many ways the colors black and white don't represent those two colors, but always represent contrast.  Black and white are used to make a complicated argument simple, but sometimes too simple.

Black and white can represent a fight against our personal dark sides, which we know is bad and often keeps us from doing the right thing.  We all have parts about us that come out sometimes. Our dark sides, no one likes them but we all have them. They come out when we least expect it and we use our understanding of good and "light" to balance the "dark".

The fight against "evil" goes under this category as well. Think about it, in every movie you have ever watched there is always a "bad" guy and a "good" guy, or a protagonist and and antagonist. Either name works but there always is one of each.  Black represents the dark side of humanity, and white, the fight against evil in the world.  Why does the bad guy always wear black?

Maleficent
Photo Courtesy of Globe and Mail 

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Maybe most disturbing to me is the contrast that black and white causes in humans of different races.  The civil rights movement seems like it could be another contrast between black and white, except that it really isn't at all.

Think about it,  have you ever seen a "white" person...

White Figure
Photo Courtesy of Stock Photo

Or a black one?

Black Figure
Photo Courtesy of Cliker

I thought not!

How do we describe people of different skin tones?  We say they are either black or white. Really, it is not only black and white.  There isn't even a black or white skin tone! It isn't really a contrast of color, but a contrast of beliefs and understanding. I think it's stupid that skin tone somehow got caught up in this idea of contrast, because it seems to represent a difference that shouldn't be there at all.

So my parting thought on black and white?
             Make sure when you are referring to "black" and "white" that you are really wanting to explore contrast, understanding that contrast is not a judgement of good or evil, or the value of a fellow human.