Is it really black and white?
worthwhile language advice
Have a question about language at work?
You can send it to admin@worthwhileconsulting.com
All questions are anonymized.
If you’re wondering about it, chances are good someone else is wondering about it too!
“Why do we have so many phrases where white is good and black is bad? White knight, whitelist, blacklist, black market. I know it’s technically not about race but I feel uncomfortable anyway.”
The answer is in metaphor. Specifically, metaphor the way cognitive linguists analyze it.
The world is a complicated place. And the ways we make sense of the world are dependent on how our brains work.
In my last article, I talked about selective attention and how our brains learn how to filter out things that seem irrelevant.
Another thing our brains do to help us deal with the world is use more basic concepts as the foundation for more abstract and complicated ones. We map the structure of a more abstract thing onto the similar structure of a more concrete thing that we already understand.
It’s efficient. And it draws on the human brain’s superpower of pattern recognition and pattern processing.
This mapping from one domain to another is called conceptual metaphor.
Time as space
Let me give you an example. The ways we experience and move through time feel more complicated than the ways we experience and move through physical space. For humans, time is more abstract, and physical space is more concrete.
So it’s no surprise that many of the words we use to describe time actually originate in descriptions of physical space. (And not just in English, but in many of the world’s languages.)
Before 9 am. Before originally meant “in front of” and expanded to mean “earlier than.” We still say things like “I’m before you in this line.”
After 5 pm. After originally meant “behind in place” and expanded to mean “later than.” We still say things like, “I’m after you in this line.”
Around noon. Around originally meant “surrounding in a circular pattern” and expanded to mean “approximately” for time. We still say things like “walk around the block.”
Linguists call this metaphorical mapping TIME AS SPACE.
(You may be more familiar with another time metaphor out there, TIME IS MONEY. While more recognizable, this metaphor is actually a lot less pervasive when it comes to the ways people talk about time.)
Understanding is seeing
Let’s think about how humans acquire information about the world around them. For those of us who are sighted, our vision is one of the most important ways we get information.
And because the vast majority of humans are sighted, vision and seeing show up in some common metaphors.
Most relevant to today’s question is the metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING. In English, we have:
“I see what you mean.”
“I don’t get her point of view.”
“Can you visualize it?”
“What an insightful idea!”
“As we have observed up to now…”
Understanding and seeing are positive both in this metaphor and in others. For humans, seeing and understanding are good things.
Photo by Josh Hild (via Unsplash)
If you are sighted and rely on visual information, seeing something allows you to learn about it and assess it. For those of you with peripheral vision, think about how compelling and attention-grabbing it is. Originally, peripheral vision kept us safe from large and fast-moving predators. Now, for many, it’s one reason why it’s hard to concentrate on a conversation when things keep moving on the tv screen in corner of your vision.
Let’s follow the logic of the experiences of sighted humans:
Seeing things keeps me safe.
When I see things, I can learn about them and understand them.
Conditions that help me see things are positive, since they keep me safe and improve my understanding.
Conditions that prevent me from seeing things are negative, since they make my environment more unsafe and impede my understanding.
Therefore, LIGHT IS GOOD and DARK IS BAD. Because when it is light, I can see things and stay safe, and when it is dark I cannot see things and I am less safe.
And there you have it. Light is good and dark is bad. In English, the lightest color is white, and the darkest color is black. So we then end up with an extension of the mapping, where white represents good stuff and black represents bad stuff.
In many English-speaking cultures, white represents purity and innocence and virginity — modern Western wedding gowns and Christian baptismal gowns are white. White is the color of clean and sterilized spaces. Angels wear white — at least angels that aren’t Biblically accurate. And compare the lighting conditions in renditions of Christian heaven and hell.
Mapping on to race
The mapping of light/white is good and dark/black is bad comes from seeing, safety, and understanding. It is based on human cognition.
Where it gets complicated and unpleasant is when we factor in race. Because white and black aren’t just used to refer to objects. They are also labels for people. (Note that the current convention when referring to people is to capitalize Black, in parallel with other ethnic groups.)
European colonization of the rest of the planet relied heavily on racialization and stratification that continue to this day.
Paler-skinned Europeans and their settler descendants were defined (by Europeans) as top of the heap. More intelligent, more educated, more godly, more civilized. More deserving of fair treatment. More deserving of money and resources. More human.
White/light is good.
And the darker-skinned people being conquered and sometimes enslaved, whose labor and resources were extracted for the benefit of others, were defined as lower. Less intelligent, uncivilized, heathens, savages. Requiring the benevolent rule of more intelligent and civilized people. Undeserving of money and resources. Like children requiring supervision. Not fully human.
Black/dark is bad.
These mappings permeate fiction, the news, social media, and politics to this day. And colorism, a preference for lighter skin tones and bias against darker skin tones, is found around the globe.
So this is why that pattern of light/white is good and dark/black is bad is making our reader who wrote in with the question uncomfortable. Even though technically the mapping comes from conceptual metaphors linking seeing and understanding, it feels like the mapping is actually aligned with “white people are better” and “dark people are worse.”
1893 Edward Much painting “The girl at the window” (via The Art Institute of Chicago)
What can you do?
Well, there is no way you are going to remove all the language that comes from the UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING, LIGHT IS GOOD, and DARK IS BAD metaphors. They permeate English, and the historical and continued dominance of sighted people means these conceptual metaphors are not going anywhere.
But you can look for substitutes for phrases mapping white onto good and black onto bad.
In tech, there has been a push for a while to shift from blacklist and whitelist to blocklist and allowlist. (Although I haven’t seen a push to move away from white hat hacking and black hat hacking.)
Instead of white knight you can say savior, instead of black market you might say underground market, and instead of black thumb you can say “I kill houseplants.”
Because even though they are technically about cognition, in the end, these black and white phrases map very neatly onto white supremacy.
And if you don’t support white supremacy, you probably don’t want to use language that makes it sound like you do.
Copyright 2025 © Worthwhile Research & Consulting
Worthwhile offers cutting-edge digital training along with “train-the-trainer” options. Scalable, cost-effective, and always science-based, we offer video courses on optimized language for smoother sales, optimized language for customer service, strategic language for managers, inclusive language at work, and more.