Black and White Thinking: The burden of a binary brain in a complex world

by Professor Kevin Dutton

Take, for instance, in the cultural sense, black and white itself. Imagine that we were to stand all the colours of humanity in a line, from the blackest of the black at one end to the whitest of the white at the other, and were to make our way along it. At no definitive point as we negotiate its length would we be able to discern where a black person ends and a brown one begins. Or where a brown person ends and a tan one begins. Or where tan ends and white picks up the thread. In terms of skin colour, those standing shoulder to shoulder with each other would actually be all but identical. We’d be faced with a continuum of indeterminate intermediates. Black and white, in a racial or an ethnic sense, would simply cease to exist.fn2