Fifty Shades of White

Written By Virginia Ziulu

On What Is Hidden Behind Apparent Uniformity

Imagine you are an Arctic explorer. As you meander through the wintry landscape, what do you see? Snow, surely. Snow everywhere. An amorphous mass of white. The ground beneath your feet, the hills in the distance, the horizon itself: all of it seems to dissolve into the same pale expanse. It is difficult to tell where one thing ends and another begins. A ridge disappears into the sky. Shadows are faint or simply absent. For all its vastness, the landscape can feel strangely featureless. But is it? What if the landscape is not as featureless as it seems, but you simply cannot see what is there?

Perhaps the problem begins with the word itself. We say “white” as though it were a single simple category that needs no further explanation. But it is not.

The book The Secret Lives of Colour makes it difficult to think of colours in such reductive terms. White, it turns out, also has nuances. There is lead white, isabelline, ivory, chalk… Shades of white that seem almost imperceptible at first glance begin to appear surprisingly distinct.

And the closer you scrutinise the colour, the more complex it becomes. Melville, for one, was fascinated by it. Moby-Dickdevotes an entire chapter to its strange power. He calls it elusive, even supernatural. Consider the polar bear. Its ferociousness, Melville suggests, becomes more frightening because it is clothed in what he calls “a fleece of celestial innocence and love”. The whiteness does not change the animal, but it changes our perception of it. The result is an unsettling contrast: innocence versus violence. “Were it not for the whiteness,” Melville writes, “you would not have that intensified terror.”

And there's more. Researchers have described snow as one of the most colourful materials on the planet. How can this be? It has to do with the limitations of our human vision. In reality, the white we see is only part of the story. Beyond our range of vision, the apparent uniformity quickly begins to fall apart.

Let's do one more thought experiment. You are no longer an Arctic explorer, but a reindeer grazing in the same landscape. You now possess ultraviolet vision. Suddenly, the landscape looks very different. It is easier to navigate. It is no longer quite so empty. You look around and the landscape seems full of things to see. Contrast appears. And there, standing out against the snow, you clearly see lichen. Where the Arctic explorer saw yet another patch of white, you now see lunch.

So, what are we to make of all this?

Perhaps the most encouraging thing about our limitations is that we can often find ways around them. What we cannot see is not necessarily beyond our reach. Earth and planetary exploration have been driven by the desire to discover what lies beyond the familiar. Science is fuelled by the urge to peek into the unknown. Technology can recover distinctions that were previously hidden, or even inaccessible to us. We can now peek inside what once seemed so simple. Thermal infrared imaging can help explain such dissimilar phenomena as heat loss from buildings and the cooling mechanisms of elephants’ ears. Ultraviolet light can even reveal the night sides of Saturn’s moons. And there are plenty more examples. More that we have yet to discover. And perhaps more still that we don’t even know we don’t know.

Yet there is a reversal to this. A darker side. An uneasiness. White is a category that gathers together things that are not quite the same. It simplifies, and that simplification is useful. We don’t need to know about individual snow grains, after all, in order to ski down the slopes. But categories sometimes do more than simplify. They can shape reality. And over time, we sometimes forget that what began as a way of making sense of the world has become our accepted view of it. Not a faithful representation, but a mere approximation to truth. And one that can leave much behind.

There’s an intriguing character, Frank Kalman, in the novel Crímenes Imperceptibles (The Oxford Murders). He has spent much of his life studying logical sequences. Given the numbers 2, 4, and 8, for instance, what number comes next? Sixteen, most people would say. It is, after all, the obvious answer. Kalman is commissioned to develop placement assessments for secondary schools in England based on such sequences. And here’s the twist. As he examines the results, he becomes fascinated by a small group of candidates whose exams are almost perfect, save for one or two answers that seem utterly ludicrous. Imagine answering, say, 1,562 to the question above. Yet when Kalman asks the candidates to explain their reasoning, he discovers that answers he had classified as errors are, in fact, valid alternative solutions. Only that reaching these solutions involved a more complex — or, dare we say, even convoluted — path, one that entirely bypassed the elementary solution and leapt much further ahead. The very thing the system treated as evidence of a deficiency could instead reveal an exceptional ability. The categorisation didn’t just fail to capture a distinction; it reversed its meaning.

White seems an innocent enough category when describing snow. But what if, instead of shades of white, we were talking about variations between human beings? Categories are useful, of course. We need them to make sense of the world. Yet in the realm of human beings, things are different. The price of getting it wrong is far higher. The consequences can be irreversible. What happens, after all, to those who fall on the wrong side of a distinction? Or to those whose abilities do not fit the categories through which we have learned to recognise them? Are we excluding the truly exceptional?

Owls are interesting creatures. There is something rather mesmerising about those wide-open, dazzled eyes. Ortega y Gasset saw the owl as an emblem of the intellectual: someone whose eyes remain wide with astonishment at a world that never ceases to be strange and beautiful. But keeping our eyes wide open can also mean something else. It is, for instance, what we are advised to do when walking down a dark alley at night. And perhaps this, too, is appropriate. We should keep our eyes open not only to discover the richness and complexity hidden behind our categories, but also to remain wary of the ease with which they can shape our understanding of the world—and of who belongs in it. Let the owl remind us of both.

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Virginia Ziulu
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What We See in the Shadows