“In the West, since antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalised, reviled, diminished, and degraded. As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing masks a fear: a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable.”

David Batchelor writes in ‘Chromophobia’

In Western culture, whiteness has functioned as more than a colour. It is an idea and a value system associated with purity, cleanliness and order.

White has been elevated as the visual expression of reason itself. From the white marble of neoclassical architecture to the pristine interiors of contemporary minimalism, whiteness has come to signify refinement, discipline, and control.

David Batchelor argues in Chromophobia, that western thought has repeatedly defined itself against colour. Throughout history, colour has often been associated with those deemed outside the boundaries of civilisation.

This fear of colour was reinforced through colonialism. As European empires expanded across the globe, they encountered worlds saturated with vibrant pigments, textiles, ornamentation, and visual traditions.

Indian cottons, African textiles, Indigenous American art, and Asian silks flooded European markets, captivating consumers while simultaneously provoking anxiety. Colour became associated with the exotic, and the sensual.

“With the first shipment of colored cotton fabric from India to Britain in the ships of the British East India Company in 1602, it seems that color was desired and despised in equal measure. Journalists such as Daniel Defoe demonized such cloth as a threat to the core of the nation. Representing the most extreme form of “effeminate luxuries of the east.”

What one discerns most readily in the published record are the protests by the silk and wool weavers in cities such as London and Canterbury, protecting their trades—but by no means was this simply a protest against cotton in favor of silk and wool. Color was no less at issue here. It beckoned to beauty and flair and being somebody else, something new. Color meant the Orient, in particular India, and it had to be contained.

Rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, north and south, it was pretty much the same distrust of color throughout Europe.”

-Michael Taussig, ‘What color is the sacred?’

Anthropologist Michael Taussig argues that colour itself became a colonial subject. European encounters with the wider world transformed colour into a symbol of otherness. Bright colours were dismissed as excessive, and vulgar. To reject colour was to distinguish oneself from those deemed inferior.

The Calico Acts of 1700 and 1720 were a series of UK Parliamentary laws that banned the import and sale of most dyed, printed, or painted cotton textiles, specifically those originating from India, China, and Persia.

“…it is women who are singled out for punishment for their passion for color, as with the Calico Acts which prohibited “the wearing of any printed or dyed calicos whatsoever, whether printed at home or abroad, and even of any printed cotton goods”. The act of 1720 made it illegal to use or wear “all printed, painted, flowered or dyed calicos in apparel, household stuffs, furniture or otherwise.”

France prohibited colored calicos and calico printing, as did other European countries, but not Holland. Yet many European women broke the law, beginning with the wives of ministers and ladies of the French court, “passionately fond of wearing painted calicoes,” but “too much” color could well mean one was a prostitute…”

-Michael Taussig, ‘What color is the sacred?’

“. . . it is also worthy of remark, that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.”

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both.”

-Chromophobia, by David Batchelor.

The elevation of whiteness in Western culture extends beyond aesthetics into the realms of religion, philosophy, and morality. Long before whiteness became associated with race, the Western world had already developed a symbolic vocabulary in which light represented goodness, truth, purity, and divine order, while darkness signified danger, and evil. Over time, these metaphors acquired racial meanings, transforming abstract oppositions into social hierarchies.

Philosopher George Yancy argues that the myth of Europe is inseparable from the myth of whiteness. Europe imagined itself as the bearer of light and reason, illuminating a supposedlydark and uncivilisedworld. Colonial expansion was frequently justifiedthrough this symbolism, presenting imperial conquest as a mission tobring enlightenment to those deemed inferior.The "dark continent" ofAfrica existed as a necessary counterpart to the fantasy of a luminous Europe.

“The myths of [dark] Africa and other continents correlate with the myth of [light] Europe itself. In short, it is my sense that the myth of Europe, driven by its expansionist greed and narcissism, is fundamentally predicated upon tropes of whiteness, bringing luminosity and light to bear upon the dark world, the dark continent of Africa.”

-George Yancy

“The symbolism of light and darkness was probably derived from astrology, alchemy, Gnosticism and forms of Manichaeism; in itself it had nothing to do with skin colour, but in the course of time it did acquire that connotation. Black became the colour of the devil and demons. Later, in the confrontation with Islam, it came to form part of the enemy image of Muslims: the symbolism of the “black demon” was transferred to Muslims—in early medieval paintings black Saracens, black tormentors and black henchmen torture Christ during the Passion. This is the tradition of the devil as the Black Man and the black bugaboo.”

-Jan Nederveen Pieterse

“For several of the church fathers in the West the colour black was associated with darkness, the devil and evil, and this has been suggested as a causal factor. However, the symbolism of black and white had already been prevalent in Greece and Rome, black having been the colour of evil demons, and this does not appear to have had any bearing on attitudes towards blacks. On the other hand there is evidence that it did have such an effect already at the beginning of the 5th century. The monk John Cassian wrote a series of spiritual Conferences, some of which depicted the devil “in the shape of a hideous Negro,” or a demon “like a Negro woman, ill-smelling and ugly.” Since Cassian’s admirer, St Benedict, ordered the Conferences to be read in the monasteries, they probably had a wide circulation.”

-Gustav Jahoda

The same operation that degraded Blackness elevated whiteness into a universal standard. The fear of colour is the fear ofthe oriental, the primitive,all the bodies and cultures that Western modernitydefined itself against.

The aesthetics of whiteness cannot be separated from the histories of empire and racial hierarchy that helped sustain them.

In contemporary culture,this aesthetic legacy endures in subtler yet pervasive ways.Minimalist design, quietluxury, and neutral tonesare widely celebrated as markers of sophistication, and elevated taste.

The language of light and darkness may appear symbolic, but its consequences have been profoundly material shaping how cultures, bodies, and entire civilisations have been imagined and valued.