Color

How do you explain color to a blind person? I have been told that the blind can see color or at least can identify differences between varying color textures. But blind people can’t see exactly what people with vision can see. Even if they were to identify a color that doesn’t mean they can see the color how we see it. Let’s consider a person who is color blind. I can think of a time in elementary school in art class when a fellow classmate was making a sculpture of a baseball player. He began to paint the baseball bat black. We began to ask, “Why are you painting the bat black?”

“I’m not painting it black. This is brown,” the classmate responded. We told him that it wasn’t but he didn’t believe us. To him the color black was our brown. All color is, is what society defines it as. What if you and I both look at a color, I identify the color as red and you identify the color as red? Simple, we both see the same color and agree that the color is red. But now what if I saw blue but knew it as the color red? What if somehow my brain reversed colors? The only reason why we know color is because someone taught the colors to us. Parents point to something and say blue, red, yellow, black, and slowly we learn colors. Who’s to say we see the same thing. What we see is only interpreted by our brain. What if I see blue but know it as red? How would we ever know if what we saw was the same? I don’t think that color should come down to a cut and dry answer. When I consider my classmate from elementary school, I think that color can be considered subjective. Color can be based upon your perception. How many times have people debated, “What color is that?” “Is that black or blue?” Is that green or blue?” “Black or purple?” How do we explain color to a blind person when blind people see something different than our eyes can see? I’d love for a blind person to try and explain what they see. It’s like people communicating in two different languages.