Shades of Morality: The Problem of Colour as a Moral Code
Since the earliest human societies, colour has been more than mere decoration — it has been a code, a signal, a powerful symbolic language shaping how we perceive the world. In particular, the division between white and black has carried profound moral weight: white representing purity, innocence, goodness; black symbolizing evil, danger, corruption. From the “white knight” riding to rescue the innocent, to the “black-hearted villain” plotting in the shadows, our culture has long leaned on this stark binary to express ideas about morality.
Yet while this symbolism has deep psychological and historical roots, it is not without serious problems — particularly in a modern, multicultural world that must grapple with the legacy of racial prejudice and the complexities of human morality. Today, many writers, filmmakers, and thinkers are working to challenge and reframe the white/black moral binary, revealing both its origins and its limitations.
To understand why these colours came to mean what they do — and why that matters so much now — we must look first to human nature itself.
The Psychology of Colour: Fear and Survival
Before language, before culture, there was instinct. Evolution shaped early humans to associate light with safety, and darkness with danger. Daylight revealed threats, allowed hunting and gathering, offered warmth and clarity. Nightfall, by contrast, cloaked predators, concealed hazards, and bred uncertainty. In this primal environment, light naturally became a symbol for life and security, while darkness evoked fear and death.
This basic survival logic wired our brains for rapid emotional reactions to colour. White and light tones evoke feelings of openness, cleanliness, and trust; black and dark tones can provoke suspicion, fear, or sadness. These associations are remarkably persistent, visible even in laboratory studies: subjects are quicker to assign positive traits to light images and negative traits to dark ones, often without conscious awareness.
Furthermore, humans favour cognitive shortcuts. The brain, seeking efficiency, loves binaries: safe/dangerous, good/bad, known/unknown. Using colour as a symbolic shortcut fits neatly into this pattern. The visible world itself seemed to support it: light illuminates, darkness hides.
Thus, even before societies assigned moral meanings to colours, our minds were already half-prepared to do so.
Historical Reinforcement: Religion, Ritual, and Power
Over millennia, these psychological tendencies were not merely preserved; they were institutionalized.
Many ancient religious systems used white to represent life, divinity, and truth. Priests wore white robes; sacrificial ceremonies featured white animals. Meanwhile, black was linked to death, the underworld, mourning — spaces beyond human control or understanding.
In Christianity, this symbolism was sharply codified: angels bathed in light, Satan ruling over a kingdom of darkness. Salvation was a journey toward light; damnation was descent into eternal night. Light was synonymous with goodness itself, darkness with evil.
These associations seeped into secular life as well. In medieval Europe, knights draped in white were idealized as champions of virtue. Courtrooms emphasized light to suggest justice; mourning rituals dressed mourners in black to recognize the grief of death. Storytelling, art, law — all reinforced the moral polarization of white and black.
During the age of empire and colonization, however, this symbolism became even more dangerous. European powers increasingly applied light/dark moral codes to human beings themselves, equating light skin with civilization, virtue, and superiority, while casting darker-skinned peoples as savage, sinful, and in need of "enlightenment." The natural instincts of colour association thus became a tool of systemic racism, weaponized to justify conquest, exploitation, and enslavement.
By the modern era, the moral coding of white and black was so deeply embedded that few thought to question it — even as it continued to shape art, law, and social structures.
Modern Problems: Race, Morality, and Simplistic Thinking
In today’s supposedly enlightened world, the white/black moral binary presents major challenges — challenges that go beyond mere symbolism and into the heart of injustice.
First and most obviously, it perpetuates racial bias. Psychological studies have shown that individuals often unconsciously associate darker colours — and by tragic extension, darker skin tones — with danger, crime, or immorality. In criminal justice systems around the world, darker-skinned defendants are disproportionately punished more harshly than lighter-skinned counterparts. Media representations still often cast dark-skinned characters in villainous roles while reserving the hero’s glow for lighter faces.
Second, the white/black binary oversimplifies the nature of morality itself. Real human beings are not either saints or sinners; they are complicated mixtures of virtues, vices, hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. By suggesting that goodness is pure and evil is absolute, colour coding encourages a shallow, judgmental view of human nature — one that obscures the messy, often ambiguous reality of moral life.
Third, the binary reinforces the fear of the unknown, making it harder to embrace difference, ambiguity, or uncertainty. In a diverse, interconnected world, the ability to navigate complexity is critical. Relying on old, simplistic metaphors of light and dark only deepens divisions, mistrust, and prejudice.
Finally, it limits creativity and storytelling. When "good" must always wear white and "evil" must always wear black, narratives grow stale and predictable. More importantly, they miss the deeper, richer drama of moral conflict — the struggles within a single soul, or the hidden nobility in a villain’s heart.
Challenging the Binary: Subversion in Modern Storytelling
Recognizing these problems, many contemporary artists and writers have deliberately worked to subvert the traditional colour-morality coding — offering more complex, nuanced, and ethically challenging narratives.
Take Game of Thrones, for instance. In George R. R. Martin’s brutal fantasy world, characters are not easily sorted into good and evil. Honourable men like Ned Stark make disastrous choices; ruthless figures like Jaime Lannister seek redemption. Visual colour coding is used, but often ironically: shining knights are revealed as corrupt, while grim, dark-clad figures like the Hound display surprising tenderness. The message is clear: morality cannot be judged by appearances.
In Marvel’s Black Panther, blackness itself is reclaimed as a symbol of dignity, wisdom, and heroism. Wakanda’s kings proudly wear black, their culture vibrant and technologically superior. T’Challa, the Black Panther, is a noble figure not despite his blackness, but because of it. Even the film’s antagonist, Killmonger, is given a sympathetic, complex backstory — he is not a "dark villain," but a tragic figure shaped by suffering and injustice.
The Witcher similarly complicates appearances. Geralt, the titular monster hunter, dresses in grim black and grey, looks dangerous, and speaks little. Yet he is the true protector of innocents, often more humane than the wealthy, brightly-clad lords and ladies who condemn him. Meanwhile, the real "monsters" are often humans who hide cruelty beneath noble façades.
Even Star Wars, long famous for its stark light/dark imagery, questions the binary in The Last Jedi. Luke Skywalker admits the failures of the Jedi Order, acknowledging that the light side was never purely good. Rey, the new heroine, dresses in neutral greys — embodying a balance between light and dark rather than a simplistic allegiance to either.
In each of these cases, creators invite audiences to look beyond the surface — to question fast judgments, to seek the human story behind appearances.
A New Vision of Colour and Morality
Moving beyond the old white/black binary does not mean abandoning colour symbolism altogether. Rather, it means using colour more thoughtfully, more self-consciously, to reflect the true complexity of human experience.
Colour can still be powerful — evoking emotion, memory, meaning. But it must be freed from the rigid moral hierarchies that once imprisoned it.
A hero may wear black and still shine with integrity. A villain may gleam in white and still conceal darkness within. A world painted in shades of grey may still hold moments of dazzling light — and terrifying shadow.
More importantly, by loosening the link between colour and moral worth, we can begin to dismantle deeper patterns of prejudice and division. We can train ourselves to look past appearances, past instinctive associations, and toward deeper, richer understandings of character, culture, and conscience.
Simply Put: Toward a More Colourful Morality
The ancient instinct to associate light with safety and darkness with danger served early humans well. Over centuries, it evolved into a vast, intricate cultural code — one that shaped religions, societies, and art. But in today’s world, that code, unexamined, can do real harm: reinforcing racial bias, simplifying moral complexity, and limiting our imaginative horizons.
The work of challenging and transforming the white/black moral binary is not merely a matter of political correctness. It is a deeper ethical project: learning to see the full humanity of others, and the full complexity of good and evil within ourselves.
By embracing a richer, more nuanced palette — by painting morality not in black and white, but in a thousand living colours — we can tell truer stories, build fairer societies, and understand more fully what it means to be human.
References
Thorstenson, C. A., Pazda, A. D., & Elliot, A. J. (2015). Sadness impairs color perception. Psychological Science, 26(3), 384–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614562749
Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. Random House.
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