If our skin color is so uncolored, why do we use color terms so often to refer to race? Races may not literally be white, black, brown, red or yellow, but people do perceive other races to be colored in the general direction of these fundamental colors, which is why color terms are used at all. So, what is all this nonsense about uncolored skin?</p>
<p>To answer this, one must remember that it is only one’s own skin that appears uncolored. I perceive my saliva as tasteless, but I might taste a sample of some of yours. I don’t smell my nose, but I might be able to smell yours. Similarly, my own skin may appear uncolored to me, but a consequence of being designed to perceive the changes around baseline is that even fairly small deviations from baseline are perceived as qualitatively colored, just as a 100 degree temperature is perceived as hot. An alien coming to visit us would find it utterly perplexing that a white person perceives a black person’s skin to be so different from his own, and vice versa. Their spectra are practically identical (see Figure 3). But then again, this alien would be surprised to learn that you perceive 100 degree skin as hot, even though 98.6 degrees and 100 degrees are practically the same. </p>
<p>Therefore, the fact that languages tend to use color terms to refer to other races is not at all mysterious. It is consistent with what would be expected if our color vision is designed for seeing color changes around baseline skin color. Whereas your baseline skin color is uncategorizable and appears uncolored, skin colors deviating even a little from baseline appear categorizably colorey…</p>
<p>…One implication of all this is that our perception of the skin color of various races is illusory, and these illusions are potentially one factor underlying racism. In fact, it leads to at least three distinct (but related) illusions of racial skin color. To understand these three illusions, it is helpful to consider these illusions in the context of perceived temperature.</p>
<p>First, as noted earlier, we perceive 98.6 degrees to be neither warm nor cold, yet we perceive 100 degrees as hot. That is, we perceive one temperature to have no perceptual quality of warmth/cold, whereas we perceive the other temperature to categorically possess a temperature (namely hot). This is an illusion because there is nothing in the physics of temperature that underlies this perceived qualitative difference between these two temperatures. For skin there is an analogous illusion, namely the perception we have that one’s own skin is uncolorful but that the skin of other races is colored. This is an illusion because there is no objective sense in which your skin is uncolorful but that of others is colorful. (Similarly, there is no objective truth underlying the perception that one’s own voice is not accented but that foreign voices are.) </p>
<p>A second consequent illusion is illustrated by the fact that we perceive 98.6 degrees as very different from 100 degrees, even though they are objectively not very different. This is closely related to the first illusion, but differs because whereas the first concerns the absence versus the presence of a perceived categorical quality, this illusion concerns the perceived difference in the two cases. The analogous illusion for skin is the perception that your own skin is very different from that of some other races. This is an illusion because the spectra underlying skin colors of different races are actually very similar.</p>
<p>And third, we perceive 102 degrees and 104 degrees as very similar in temperature, despite their objective difference being greater than the difference between 98.6 degrees and 100 degrees, the latter which we perceive as very different. For skin colors, we lump together the skin colors of some other races as similar to one another, even though in some cases their colors may differ as much as your own color does from either of them. For example, while people of African descent distinguish between many varieties of African skin, Caucasians tend to lump them all together as “black” skin. (And for the perception of voice, many Americans confuse Australian accents with English ones, two accents which are probably just as objectively different as American is to English.)</p>
<p>As a whole, these illusions lead to the false impression that other races are qualitatively very different from ourselves, and that other races are homogeneous compared to our own. It is, then, no wonder that we humans have a tendency to stereotype other races: we suffer from perceptual illusions that encourage this. But by recognizing that we suffer from these illusions, we can more ably counter them.