Chromatic Malfunction

Colour is a neurological rumour.

Think about it.

We trust our eyes with astonishing confidence

for organs that spend half their lives

mistaking shadows for people.

Your eyes don't actually see colour.

They perceive different wavelengths of light.

Your brain takes the evidence,

runs it through some ancient wet software,

and announces: RED.

And because nobody has ever thought

to question the software,

we call this reality.

Purple is even funnier.

There is no single wavelength of light that says: I am purple.

Purple is your brain

looking at certain combinations of light

and essentially going,

"Fuck it. Call it purple."

And we did.

We named it.

We painted with it.

We wore it.

We put it on flags.

We gave it royal significance.

Humanity has always been remarkably generous

towards things that don't exist the way we think they do.

Black is stranger.

White is stranger still.

Neither is a single wavelength of visible light.

Black is what you get

when visible light doesn't make it back to your eyes.

White is what you get

when a whole spectrum decides to arrive, all at once.

And yet, 

put them on a palette

and suddenly:

Black.

White.

Colours.

Apparently physics can be overruled

by an artist with a piece of cardboard.

Which should have been the end of the matter.

And yet, it wasn't.

Because then we looked at skin.

And we did 

what humans always do

when confronted

with something different.

We named it.

Black.

White.

Brown.

As if a human being were a paint sample.

As if melanin were a moral position.

As if somebody's epidermis had arrived with political affiliations.

And then,

because naming wasn't apparently quite stupid enough,

we arranged them on the branches of a tree.

This colour is beautiful.

That colour is dirty.

This colour is intelligent.

That colour is primitive.

This colour belongs here.

That colour belongs there.

This colour should rule.

That colour should serve.

This colour should be feared.

This colour should be desired.

This colour should be married.

This colour should be killed.

A photon changed direction

and civilisation lost its fucking mind.

Think about the scale of the stupidity.

We took an optical distinction

and turned it into a social distinction.

Then a social distinction into a hierarchy.

Then a hierarchy into an institution.

Then an institution into an empire.

Then an empire into a history textbook

with the audacity to call itself objective.

We have enslaved people over pigmentation.

Colonised people over pigmentation.

Segregated people over pigmentation.

Murdered people over pigmentation.

Generations have lived and died under systems

built around how light happened to bounce off their skin.

A fucking photon.

Imagine being so confident in your eyesight

that you construct a civilisation around it.

We don't even agree on what we are seeing.

Ask two people to describe a colour

and eventually you discover

that nobody has access

to anybody else's experience of it.

Your red could be my red.

Your red could be something

I have no god damned idea how to imagine.

We have no way of checking.

And yet we've spent centuries

checking each other's worth

by skin tone.

That is perhaps the most human thing about us.

Black is never just black.

White is never just white.

Purple isn't even a single wavelength

and somehow

we gave it a fucking monarchy.

So perhaps

the problem was never colour.

Perhaps colour

was simply the first thing

our eyes noticed and our egos could weaponise.

We keep insisting

the world is black and white.

It isn't.

It never was.

There are wavelengths.

There are bodies.

There are billions of slightly different ways of being alive.

And then there is the human brain,

squinting at all of it,

desperate to simplify what it cannot control, and whispering:

"I know what colour you are."

Perhaps that is the real malfunction.

Not that we see colour.

That we see it and think

we've understood the anatomy wearing it.