—Spectacular consumption is a process through which the relations among cultural forms, the culture industry, and the lived experiences of persons are shaped by public consumption. This essay examines how the spectacular consumption of “Whassup?!” Budweiser advertising is constitutive of white American ambivalence toward “authentic” blackness. The essay argues that Budweiser’s hottest ad campai...

The spectral efficiency of blackness induction was measured in three normal trichromatic observers and in one deuteranomalous observer. The psychophysical task was to adjust the radiance of a monochromatic 60-120' annulus until a 45' central broadband field just turned black and its contour became indiscriminable from a dark surrounding gap that separated it from the annulus. The reciprocal of ...

The surface-mode property of "blackness" is induced by simultaneous contrast with an adjacent, more luminant surround. As numerous studies have shown, the degree of blackness induced within an achromatic test field is a function of the relative luminance of the adjacent chromatic inducing field, but not of its hue. But in the converse case of chromatic test fields, susceptibility to blackening ...

A small patch of achromatic light viewed within a large achromatic surround appears gray or black when the radiance of the surround is well above that of the patch. No single light can match the appearance of the patch because no light in isolation appears blackish; blackness is induced by a second stimulus. The present experiments examine the locus of the mechanisms mediating induction of blac...

While black is one of the most prevalent industrial colors in the world, the colorimetric attributes of what is considered black vary significantly and the range of subtle hue undertones can be numerous. However, no systematic study can be found in the literature pertaining to the potential role of colorimetric attributes in the perceptual assessment of blackness. We have experimentally determi...

We examine the interlinked migrations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, between the Dominican Republic and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and, finally, migrations from these three countries to the United States. The literature tends to draw stark differences between race and racism in the United States and the nonracial societies of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. However, alt...

In what remains one of the central accomplishments of cognitive anthropology, Berlin and Kay (1969) demonstrated that the diversity of human color systems was built on a universal infrastructure, with black and white being the most basic colors in all systems. The analytical focus of their work is a structural system divorced from the messy tasks of actually using color terms to make relevant d...

Tests of additivity of the postreceptoral pathways that mediate the perception of blackness were conducted under conditions of spatial contrast. Observers increased the radiance of a surrounding annulus until a broadband (white) test center appeared completely black. Additivity tests with heterochromatic flicker photometry (HFP) and direct brightness matching were also conducted for each observ...

This article deconstructs the conventional theory that "brightness" and "lightness" constitute perceptual dimensions corresponding to the physical dimensions of luminance and reflectance, and builds in its place the theory that brightness and lightness correspond to computationally defined "modes," rather than dimensions, of perception. According to the theory, called gamut relativity, "blackne...