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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death? To me, it has always represented either nothingness, like the void of Space, or opting out of an aesthetic choice - I don't know what color car I want to drive, so I'll just get a black one.

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Man who runs a funeral business books his hearse in to have the paintwork redone. What colour is it?

Woman gets dressed to go to a funeral. What colour dress does she pick out?

In large parts of the west, these questions have one answer.

Yet "black tie event" does not imply death, instead it implies a fancy party. In auto racing, a black flag is a penalty, but it's not fatal. The American Express Black card is a symbol of vast wealth, not mortality.

Your statement does not contradict the former - black represents death but death does not necessarily represent black.

It's not that black implies death. Rather: what color goes well with death? In the west that color is black.

>Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death?

How is it any different "near Seattle"? All over the US and Europe people have been using black to signify death for centuries. From the usual depiction of death as a black robe wearing skeleton with a skythe, to the black color of hearses, to the black clothing traditionally associated with funerals and mourning, down to black clothes worn by Death Metal and Goth fans.

I actually think the hearse and funeral/mourning clothes count as opting out of aesthetic choice - minimizing the self by foregoing self-expression

Have you seen what funeral directors wear? Sometimes it's like a panto costume, with weird ribboned hats and waistcoats and tails and just a mishmash of different stuff.

Try this: what color is death to you?

In occident there is a general consensus that black is the normal color for death, but in some parts of Asia death is represented by white. This is the reason of karategi being white for example.

Most martial arts uniforms are white. Due to this, it could be said that white is the color of learning to fight.

Are white in japanese martial arts, for the same reason, but white is not so present in Indonesian schools of martial arts for example. It was supposed to intimidate the oponent. But the context was lost in occident. White were also much easier to clean, so was readily adopted and a practical choice indoors. In real war is not so practical, white gets dust and turns quickly to kaki, other historical uniforms were scarlet red with the purpose of hiding the blood (and vital info about the damage done to his carrier). With fire weapons, all those bright colors turned out to make easier targets and all armies learn quickly to addopt camo.

Death is a change of state. When a car runs out of gas, what color is that situation? What is the color of an arriving email? The concept doesn't apply well.

Red, Green respectively.

With a big enough sample we might be able to draw some conclusions.

Ghosts are usually white.

That's because they started picturing them back in the day as wearing the same white linen thing (shroud) they used to wrap dead bodies in before burying them.

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