Etymology of Colorblind

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Super duper, who’s this?

This is Tafrica Harewood from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi, Tafrica, welcome to the program.

Welcome.

Thank you.

I am calling because I’d like to know the origin of the word colorblind and when it started being used to reference people who are considered to be tolerant of others’ differences, whether it be racial or color differences or what have you.

Oh, interesting question. What got you wondering about that?

Well, my husband and I were reading an article in Newsweek about whether or not babies are racist, which was a very, very interesting question.

And it used the term colorblind. And then we got talking about it and wondered if you guys could give us an answer about that.

How interesting. I didn’t read the article. What did it say?

It was just talking about whether or not children are born knowing difference and being able to kind of segregate themselves according to their own differences or if that’s taught by their parents.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

So in that context, they were using the term colorblind to mean just sort of oblivious to the color of one’s skin.

Exactly.

Is that right?

Okay.

Well, I can tell you that the earliest uses of colorblind had to do specifically with that physical inability to see certain colors, the colorblindness that we think of as afflicting about what? About 8 or 9 percent of the population, I think.

Mostly men, right?

Yeah, mostly men, you know, when they can’t see certain colors.

And that first came to light in 1794.

The phenomenon did.

There was a scientist named John Dalton in England who realized that he and his brother saw things differently.

And he ended up writing this paper that at the time really caught people up short because people hadn’t really thought about that before.

And so for a few decades, it was called Daltonism, that physical condition.

And then people started using the term colorblind instead.

But the original sense of colorblind was, as I said, that physical inability to see certain colors.

It’s such an interesting phenomenon that pretty soon it took on metaphorical connotations, you know, being colorblind as to politics or something like that.

People started using it metaphorically.

Or colorblind to gender as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Isn’t that weird?

Colorblind to gender.

And also in reference to race as well.

Okay.

Wow.

You can find it in reference to race as early as 1865, maybe even a little earlier than that.

There was an Anglican bishop who was a black man who was the first Anglican bishop to be something other than white.

And Samuel Crouther, I believe, was his name.

And so the term came up in some writings related to his appointment.

Okay.

And by 1890, colorblind to mean insensitive to the color of one’s skin was so entrenched that people wrote about it in terms of that was the main use of it outside of medical cases.

It’s almost always about race these days when we talk about colorblindness, right, Martha?

We almost never say it in reference to gender or disability.

Exactly.

But for a while there, it was fairly general.

Glad we asked.

I’m glad you had an answer.

I really appreciate it.

We are, too.

And now I want to go look up that Newsweek article, too.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

It was really interesting.

Well, thanks a lot for calling, Tafrica.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, Grant, it’s really fun to look at scientific writings around that period when people started getting a clue.

Because why wouldn’t you assume that everybody saw colors the same way that you do?

But there are all these accounts of people figuring out that this captain ran his ship aground because he couldn’t tell the difference between the red lights and the green lights on the buoys.

Very interesting.

Yes, and I remember reading that there was, this is the period when people started to understand more clearly that some traits were inherited through the family line that weren’t obvious, like the color of the eyes or the color of the hair, right?

People started to understand that there were other things about the body that were passed from the parents to the children.

Fascinating stuff.

Well, if you were reading an article and a word jumped out at you and you’re curious about it, call us 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.