Do white people exist?

     Do white people exist?

      In previous posts on this blog I have questioned the existence of Santa Claus, and money, and intelligent life on Earth. I have done so for philosophical reasons, usually relating to the incompleteness theorems of metamathematics. But white people? Don’t they exist; and also black people, and yellow? Surely my own eyes will say yes.

      But in fact my eyes say no! And so will yours, if only you use them.

      For what is white? It is the color of paper, and clouds, and milk. Suppose you, the reader, were called a white person; and that you were to pour from a carton of milk into a clear glass; and you were to see, to your amazement, that the fluid in the glass was the exact same color as your hand. Would you drink it?

      Of course not! You would sniff the glass suspiciously; you would empty the glass into a sink and run water to wash the sink clean; and then you would take that carton of milk back to the store, and demand your money back. Why? Because milk is white, but this stuff wasn’t!

      If you ever saw a cloud the same color as you, and if it started to snow you-colored snow, then wouldn’t you hide indoors until it stopped? That wouldn’t be a normal cloud! Normal clouds are white!

      Put a piece of white paper diagonally atop another piece. It will be hard to see the edge, for the two pieces of paper are the same color. Now put your hand atop a piece of white paper. It will be easy to see the outline of your hand, for the paper is white and you are not.

      A purist would object that albinos exist, and albinos are white. Not exactly; for even albinos, though pale indeed, still show in their skin some yellow, from subcutaneous fat, and some red, from arteries, and some blue, from veins. So even albinos have a complex color, tertiary at least; and the rest of us have a quartenary skin color.

      Seeking unbiased vision, I asked a professional artist what color I am. Katherine McKay said that I am a light, warm shade of brown. Now I am about as Caucasian as they come; indeed my grandparents came from Poland and the Ukraine, which neighbor the Caucasus mountain range; so if I am a shade of brown, then so is pretty much anyone else. (Slightly off-white pinkish albinos excluded.) If you were to write with ink the color of Louis Farrakhan on paper the color of Patrick Buchanan, then you would have to squint to read whatever you wrote, for you were writing with brown upon brown.  Excluding the rare pinkish albino, we humans are basically mammal-colored. 

      So if anyone were to tell you that he saw a stadium full of white people, then he was seeing something that was not there and could not be. He was seeing with his preconceptions, not with his eyes. An illusion!

      White people, and black people, and yellow people, are all of them hallucinations! And not figuratively, but literally!