"Black" gets associated with brown coloured people, but that is not the definition that I tend to use. When I say "black", I am referring to the absence of light. Here is a list of synonyms of black as a colour: void; darkness; pitch; charcoal; coal; raven; jet; obsidian; onyx; melanoid. Now, notice the last one on that list. The word melanoid is somewhat obscure. It is a reference to the medical term melanosis, which simply describes an 'abnormally dark pigment of the skin' caused by a lack of melanin. If you happen to be a doctor, well first of all, congratulations on completing what must have been a grueling and luxurious academic career. Regardless, if you happen to be a dermatologist, then you should know that melanin is the molecule responsible for the dark colour in skin. If you don't have enough melanin, then you're albino or albinoid. If you have a lot of it, then your skin is brown.
In the Encyclopedia Brittanica, it says that “Industrial melanic moths have arisen."
Industrial melanism is, in short, a phenomena where animals have become darker due to natural selection in industrial areas. For example, in areas where the local trees have been blackened by air pollution, moths which are white will be more obvious to hungry hungry birds when they rest on those trees during the day. Therefore, evolution favours any moth which happens to have more melanin in its system, and eventually most of the moths in the area are black. This phenomena was first recorded in the 1800s, apparently.
If you're a person with white skin and you want your skin to be darker, you can eat pills that increase your melanin production, thereby darkening your skin. Or you can burn it with fire or light, which will sort of burn up your skin a little bit and make the outside of it darker. Some people call this process 'tanning'.
If you're a person with brown skin and you want your skin to be whiter, there is also many Magical Elixirs sold specifically for that purpose. If these pictures with giant TMZ watermarks on them aren't fake, then Micheal Jackson kept a bunch of pictures of pink babies in his room, along with multiple Magical Elixirs in capsules. If those pictures were actually faked, props to whoever took that much time/energy to create such an elaborate still life, and for contributing to the Outsider Still Life Art World. I earnestly hope that that is the case.
The word melancholy seems to have originally come from the ancient Greeks, who used the word melancholia to describe a state of being full of black-coloured bile.
Personally, I can identify with that. Here is something that I wrote a few days ago:
How come when we suffer we feel a heightened desire to express ourselves? Is it that in some deluded, subconscious section of our mind believes that the expression of suffering might lead to alleviation? How ironical, for that is regularly the exact opposite of the truth. Please! You cry out, begging me to stop. It won’t help, you say, to focus on these thoughts, these uninnocent fancies. Instincts are disgusting. The flaws of human nature look to me like rancid orifices, covered in rot and bacterium. Luckily there is fire, ready to burn up anything that might illicit desire to be reduced. Thank the stars for fire. But here is an ocean of blackness. It is not cloud-draped water, but liquid blackness, all ejected vomitously from a heart which gasps in the expelled acid, aching. Where is a bucket of black paint? I know exactly what I would do with it. I would pour it all down my throat, feeling the toxins seep into my blood stream. Maybe my blood would then be dyed black, so that the inside surfaces of my arteries would not only have the spectacle of blackness, but also the toxicity of an agent that truly has the ability to directly rob my body of health. I want to sting the foul insides of my body with a poisonous liquid like that. To do so would not distract me. It would increase what I want to decrease. But suffering isn’t negative. That is a perfect thesis. Suffering isn’t negative, but god knows that it’s black. I've seen the form of the spectre inside of it, and I can testify that it is a black liquid.
Why did I feel such an incredible fascination with black-coloured liquid when I wrote that? I know that I wasn't thinking of melanin or poisoned bile, because I hadn't learned very much about those liquids until I researched them for the purpose of this Literary Excursion, just now. Why is the colour black traditionally associated with rhetorically negative things like malice, misery, gloominess, and even dirtiness?
In some of the darker moments of human history, white men had gotten it into their heads that people of African descent were inferior to those of European descent. It might be shamefully true that some of the association of the word black with evil comes from racism. But let's not even acknowledge that.
Historically, a completely black flag flying from a mast signified pirates. There are many countries which have flags with the colour black on them. However, it seems that there is no country with a completely, or even mostly black flag. Assumedly, it is the case that countries are afraid of being identified as total pirates, but not afraid of being identified as half pirates.
Here is a list of black coloured liquids: poisoned bile; ink; black paint; oil; tar. I honestly can not think of any more. If you can think of more, please let me know, my dear.
It's also worth noting that any liquid, when it is completely hidden in shadow, is black. This means that all liquid, and for that matter, everything that's inside your body right now, is black. By the same reasoning, anything can be completely black, when it is robbed of all light. Eventually, the sun will be completely black, as well as every star in the universe. It can be posited that eventually, all of existence will be reduced to a black void, and that all of existence was once nothing but a black void.
Every time that the sun is hidden in the shadow of the earth, that side of the earth is shrouded in relative blackness. This is a sneak preview of the death of the universe itself. Every time that you close your eyes, you can look at relative blackness. You are forced, therefore, to look directly at relative blackness, thousands of times every day. And then at night when the whole world around you is black, you must close your eyes for at least 6 hours, to sleep. This means that the blackness takes over your thoughts and causes you to see a great many images and hear a great deal of sounds, all of which are not real.
Black holes are objects which are very dense. Their gravitational pull causes even light itself to be pulled into them. At the exact center of our galaxy, there is an enormous black hole, which is slowly consuming our galaxy. Scientists have posited that at the heart of every galaxy, there is a black hole.
The blood in our human hearts is also black, unless it is exposed to light, which would be a serious health concern.
Black is an unpopular colour for cars because the colour black absorbs light, turning it into heat. This means that people with black cars would need to open the window or turn on the air conditioning during the summer to avoid frying up.
When I dream, I tend to dream about moving through endless subterranean environments. Moving through abandoned pathways underneath urban buildings, through crumbling concrete tunnels and disused service pathways. These environments always seem to be naturally well lit. But I also enjoy exploring abandoned buildings. Contrary to dreams, Abandoned buildings tend to be shrouded in real darkness, especially at night. In the real world, I find it useful to keep a small flashlight on my keychain. In my dreams, I don't carry that flashlight, because I wouldn't need it. This is a testimony to the fact that my dreams have less blackness in them then does the real world.
Aside from the sections that are open for public viewing, the limestone catacombs underneath Paris are always dark, until some cataphile brings a torch down there. The catacombs have many human bones in them. It is true that blackness is associated with death. It is also true that it is a popular trend to bury dead people. This means that most corpses, if they aren't disintegrated by fire or maggots, are usually permanently shrouded in darkness. Darkness is associated with death, because when we imagine death, we tend to imagine an endless unconsciousness, like sleep. And when you're asleep, you see blackness. But that is misleading, because when you are dead, you see nothing whatsoever. Thus it is shown that the phantom that people sometimes associate with blackness is not really black. Death is colourless. But death is not evil, nor are many of the other things which absorb all light.
---Thanks to Tubular for reminding me that tuxedos exist. Do you think that people wear black during formal gatherings because the colour black reminds them of poisoned bile, or the spectre of death itself? It seems unlikely. Maybe when people wear black suits, the symbology is that they are wearing the black flag of Piracy. In tubular's words: "Black can also be associated with formality, as in a black-tie event—though there is still a step above, the white-tie event—and that leads right into the idea of black as cool, calculated sophistication."
Let me know if I missed anything else.