On Color, by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing (Yale University Press, 2018)
I had bought this book at the U. of T. bookstore just a short time before the world went into self-isolation, thinking it would be fun to read something abstract about the source materials of the image-making process. But as self-isolation progressed, concerns about colour became anything but abstract. Fortunately, when I cracked open the book, I discovered that it was less abstract than I had first supposed.
On Color is organized into 10 chapters—one chapter for each colour of the rainbow (arbitrarily set at seven by Sir Isaac Newton) plus a chapter each for black, white, and grey. Each chapter engages us in a wide-ranging, often erudite, and largely aleatory meditation. It is the work of a mind at play.
So, for example, in the chapter on red, we learn that pigeons can see more colours than humans because pigeons are tetrachromats and humans are trichromats which is another way of saying that pigeon retinas detect colours with four different kinds of cones whereas humans have only three.
There is more to seeing than the physiological apparatus for detecting photons, of course. There is a neurological dimension to seeing, as well as a social dimension. And when the social dimension is subject to the stresses of power, seeing assumes a political dimension.
Part way along the path to political seeing, we encounter the colour orange. In western Europe, for at least a thousand years, the colour orange did not have its own descriptor. Instead, European languages, including Old English, used compound words meaning either yellow-red or red-yellow. It was not until the beginning of the 16th century, when Portuguese traders returned from India with a cargo of heretofore unknown citrus fruit that the word orange as a colour entered our vocabulary. Even then, it took more than a hundred years. Initially, people used orange as a colour descriptor by comparing orange objects to the orange (fruit). It was not until the 17th century that the word “orange” appeared on its own without reference to the fruit.
And then we have the chapter on the colour yellow, at which point the political dimension of seeing presents itself full bore. It has become a commonplace of Western racism to draw a pejorative association between the colour yellow and people from Asian countries. But it turns out this association is far more recent than one might suppose. Early contact with people from Japan and China prompted European notes which described these strangers as “white like us”. The phrase “yellow peril” comes from Kaiser Wilhelm in 1895 and exploited feelings of collective anxiety that fueled a rising nationalism. By the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910-11), the entry for China noted that while its people had a variety of skin colours, “yellow, however, predominates”. If there is anything that predominates, it is the use of colour in racist tropes.
In the same chapter, Kastan talks about Crayola crayons which, until 1962, included a colour described as “Flesh”, the colour approximating the skin of Caucasians from western European countries, as if that was the only colour that counts as flesh. In 1962, Crayola changed the name of the colour to “Peach”.
In his book, The Skin We’re In, Desmond Cole offers a childhood memory that demonstrates the impact of such nomenclature. As a grade one student attending a predominantly white school in Oshawa, Cole remembers colouring pictures with the other children:
We shared the pencil crayons as we drew the things kids draw: dark brown for the tree trunks, bright green for leaves and grass, yellow for the sun. Someone asked for the “skin colour” pencil. Everyone else seemed to understand that a particular cream colour was what she wanted. None of my peers seemed to realize this label excluded me, but I felt it in my bones and never forgot it.
These were Laurentian pencil crayons which, years earlier, had a colour called Natural Flesh.
One would expect the Black chapter to be likewise racially charged, but it isn’t, at least not intentionally. Instead, it opens with a meditation on Audrey Hepburn’s LBD (Little Black Dress) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Kastan ignores the fact that immediately after we see Hepburn in her LBD, we meet her landlord, Mr. Yunioshi, played by Mickey Rooney wearing Coke-bottle glasses and buck-teeth and mixing up his r’s and l’s. It seems to me the Breakfast at Tiffany’s reference works better in the Yellow chapter.
Oddly enough, Black concerns appear in the Indigo chapter. This is not because Kastan subscribes to the cultic tenets of Urantia which describes Black people as the Indigo peoples. Rather, it is because the manufacture of indigo dye constitutes its own sordid chapter in the history of slavery. Until the development of a synthetic substitute in 1880 and the scaling up of industrial production in the decades after that, the production of indigo dye was backbreaking and toxic work. A contemporary witness reports that slaves working on indigo never lived more than seven years. It was produced on plantations in Florida, South and Central America, and on British plantations in India. The chief driver of demand was the military. The French army and the British navy needed indigo dye for their uniforms, offering up yet another example of “collateral damage” in the deployment of military forces. In contemporary consumer culture, the chief driver of demand for indigo dye is, of course, blue jeans.
The final chapter—grey—addresses photography and the ongoing debate as to whether the shift from black-and-white film to colour has added anything to the art. I leave that discussion to another time when I can draw the chapter into conversation with other writings on the topic.
Finally, I note an obvious omission in the book which otherwise faces squarely the politicization of colour. While it gives much space to Newton’s colour theory and his naming the colours of the rainbow, the book makes no mention of the rainbow itself as the universal symbol of gay pride. While colour, in reference to skin, is the principal (pejorative) way to denote race, colour is an important (positive) way to denote the diversity of human sexuality and genders. It strikes me this is something worth celebrating and deserves an eleventh chapter.