Color Is Not a Coincidence
Color is one of the elements of composition that draws me in most strongly. I am from Bahia, and this relationship has long shaped the way I see Bahia and Africa. I recognize the same attraction in choices that are entirely personal, such as my taste for colorful sneakers and clothing. At some point, I began to wonder whether there was something beyond my own sensibility behind this recurring attraction. I wanted to know whether there was any documented historical, cultural, or social relationship between Black populations and particular ways of perceiving, choosing, or using color. That was why I began to research it.
South African psychologist K. W. Grieve, affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, studied 26 urban, educated Black South Africans, 11 men and 15 women, in Traditional Beliefs and Colour Perception, published in 1991. Black and red emerged among the group’s preferred colors. The finding, however, called for caution. The associations identified were generally consistent with those found in Western studies and “did not appear to indicate ethnic differences based on traditional beliefs.” The author also notes that “the particular significance of colour cannot be separated from the context in which it is observed.”
In Senegal, psychologists Walter D’Hondt and Michel Vandewiele, affiliated with the École Normale Supérieure at the Université de Dakar, studied 2,500 primary-school children and 943 secondary-school students. Published in 1983, Colors and Figures in Senegal found brown to be the most frequent preference among the younger children and black among the older students. The authors considered possibilities involving cultural identity, culturally shaped sensitivity to color, and the mental traditions of different ethnic groups, without establishing a single explanation for the findings.
In the United States, psychologist N. Clayton Silver of Tulane University and his collaborators studied color preferences among 582 college students in 1988. Blue was the most frequently chosen color among the groups studied, but Black participants showed greater relative preferences for red, purple, black, and less frequently chosen colors, while White participants more often chose blue and green. The study therefore documents a statistical difference in color preference, but it does not provide grounds for attributing that difference to a single cultural or racial origin.
Anthropologist Anita Jacobson-Widding took the investigation in another direction with Red-White-Black as a Mode of Thought, published in 1979. Her study of peoples of the Lower Congo was not simply about aesthetic preference. It examined systems of color classification embedded in ritual symbolism and cognitive thought. Red, white, and black appear within specific cultural relationships. Color ceases to be merely a visual property and becomes part of the symbolic organization of experience.
In Brazil, anthropologist Mattijs van de Port, a researcher at the Research Centre Religion and Society within the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, examined the circulation of Candomblé imagery, practices, and aesthetics in the public sphere of Salvador in Candomblé in Pink, Green and Black. His research shows how this repertoire came to function as an important “symbol bank” for different groups and how its circulation in public life produced new frameworks for what anthropology had traditionally constructed as religion and as an “African universe in Brazil.”
After studying these works, I arrived at a different conclusion from the one I might have reached if I had simply been looking for confirmation of a personal impression. I found no scientific basis for claiming that Black people, by nature, have a greater preference for color or for more intense colors. I found differences in preference among particular groups, specific cultural systems of meaning, and a documented history of symbolic uses of color in African and Afro-diasporic societies.
The research did not diminish my attraction to color. It made the question behind that attraction more complex. What I perceive in Bahia, what I recognize in Africa, and what I choose for myself do not need to share a single origin in order to be connected. Color can be perception, choice, context, memory, identity, ritual, or belonging. It can also simply remain a visual force.
Perhaps it is precisely this impossibility of reducing color to a single explanation that continues to draw me to it. The more I try to understand what color produces, the more I realize that its presence extends far beyond what the eye can recognize.
