Color is never neutral. Even its spelling is contested.

Across cultures, colors carry unspoken codes. In the West, black is the color of mourning. In China, the traditional funeral color is white, symbolizing purity, transition, and the cycle of life.

Even a person’s skin color can shift meaning depending on the context.

In America, having an African parent makes me Black - a legacy of the “one-drop rule,” a racial logic that still shapes how identity is perceived. But in Nigeria, I become “Oyibo,” a term used for someone who appears white or foreign because of my mixed heritage. The labels change; the person does not. Color is socially assigned, not biologically fixed.

At the start of the decade, Black was the couleur du jour. Brands were posting black squares on Instagram and declaring that Black Lives Matter.

Back then, Translation worked with Beats by Dre to pose the challenge: “You love Black culture, but do you love me?” 

The world has changed radically since then and the answer to that question has become clearer.

Scroll forward and into this moment steps Pantone, announcing its 2026 Color of the Year: Cloud Dancer. The company described it as “a lofty white whose aerated presence acts as a whisper of calm and peace in a noisy world.”

Some people saw something different: the elevation of whiteness as the symbolic color of the year at a time of heightened racial tension. A white banner held up as the US actively debates the meaning of “America First” and its ties to white identity and white nationalism.

Pantone’s announcement arrived not long after another controversy: the American Eagle campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney. The “great jeans/genes” play on words was interpreted by many as echoing long-standing eugenics rhetoric.

These two events may not have been coordinated, but online, they converged. People stitched them together as part of a broader discomfort with how the cultural narrative is shifting. As one commentator on Instagram put it: “Pantone Has Great Jeans.”

Color is always contextual. And context is always cultural.

If anyone doubts this, consider the fate of South African star Tyla. She shot from viral newcomer to global phenomenon, hailed as the next Rihanna. Then, almost overnight, she became the subject of fierce criticism for identifying herself as “Coloured” - a term rooted in South Africa’s specific racial classifications. There, “Coloured” is a recognized ethnic identity tied to history and community.

But US audiences, unfamiliar with this context, perceived the term through an American racial lens, where the word is outdated and offensive.

The nuance was lost. Context was omitted. And the backlash was immediate.

Of course, cultural misunderstanding wasn’t the only factor. The internet’s green-eyed monster - the impulse to tear down a young, talented, beautiful woman of color - played its part. But again: context shaped interpretation.

So what’s the point here?

I’m trying to avoid the cheesy “what brands can learn from this” trope, but there is something worth discussing.

There's a large body of academic research showing that color significantly influences consumer perception and behavior through complex psychological mechanisms that operate in highly contextual ways.

Despite what some might like to believe, most marketers are not idiots. While we all have cultural blind spots, we are typically very intentional about the content we put out into the world. We sweat the details - sometimes obsessively.

This is why I doubt the folks at Pantone were surprised by the reaction their color choice provoked. In fact, during a Dec. 4 launch event, Pantone’s president, Sky Kelley, said she knew Cloud Dancer would be “pretty controversial”. 

We live in an attention economy, and they found a way to get some. I suspect that was the real point of the exercise.

The broader truth is that, like the famous blue-dress/gold-dress illusion, color is a Rorschach test. Our perceptions are not fixed - and never neutral. Our interpretations reveal the fractures we haven’t healed and the identities we’re still negotiating.

Or to put it another way, when it comes to understanding the power of color in culture, the answer is rarely black or white.