What really is color?

What really is color? It is something that cannot be described or identified without saying its name, yet we see it EVERYWHERE. It’s hard to make sense of it especially when it is something that we see and something we just put a name onto. In the world, color represents so many things, and we tend to relate them to specific ideas in our head. For instance, in the novel Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, velvet roses were red, silk wings were blue, and the snow was white, and all together, the three colors symbolized freedom. It’s crazy how if you mention a color in the world, past and present, that people would know what you’re talking about. A couple hundred years ago, when you heard black, you would immediately think of slavery, and white would immediately be thought of as power. Nowadays, this isn’t as big of a problem, but there’s still colors that represent situations. Red, white, and blue represent America and freedom, green and red represent Christmas, etc. We use all of these abstract things called colors that we can’t wrap out heads around to represent other things, and that is what confuses me, why don’t we know what colors are.

Whenever I think of colors, I always imagine, what if there was another color we haven’t discovered yet? What would it look like? In all my years of thinking about this, I have never thought of a new color, and I can’t wait until that new color is discovered.