17 December 2019

Understanding colour blindness

I was talking about colour blindness again today. As I said, it’s a topic that I’m prone to going off on. I’d been drafting some rough ideas and a few paragraphs for the book° on the train down to London and I had been thinking about how other people perceive colour blindness.

And, interestingly, this was the turn the conversation took. The two people I was speaking to are intelligent and perceptive yet it was just incredibly challenging for them to get a handle on what it’s like to be colour blind. I showed them the picture in the last blogpost — and, of course, they both saw the number and I was able to explain what I saw. Just a mess of red-brown-green blobs. (I almost feel like I need a new word for this kind of shade as to me, it’s just a single colour with varying shades.) I also pulled up one of the early chapter drafts, provisionally titled Everyday annoying shit and was able to point out some of the problems colour blindness can cause.

It would be good in the book to make it a guide for people to try to get a feel for how it is to be colour blind. Mostly, it doesn’t feel like anything of course but the world does just stump us in some funny little ways. With 1 in 12 men affected, there are very few people out there who don’t know others who are colour blind. One often sees, in any description of colour blindness, photographs that have been altered to take out red hues or green hues. Pictures of market stalls of fruit seem very popular for this. I’ve no idea if these work, they don’t for me, for obvious reasons, but they seem to lack a reality and an essential quality that tells you about the lived experience. If I can capture a little of that I’ll be happy.


Colour Blindness


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Purple skies and pink elephants I do love talking about colour blindness. You can’t be in conversation with me too long before I’ll raise the topic and I suspect most of my work
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