Quote Originally Posted by JohnnyZ
Technically speaking, black is every colour mixed together. This makes it a shade, not a colour at all. Same goes for white, it is the absence of colour and therefore also a shade.

Imagine if black and white were colours though.. Charlie Chaplin movies would be fucked up.
The interesting thing is how the opposite is true when talking about light. White light split by prism reveals good ol' Roy G Biv.. and black is the absence of all light and thusly all color.

So I guess we could look at it like this: whatever properties give an object its color, lets say whatever makes a shirt red, absorbs every other color and allows red to be reflected back into our eyes. White shirts absorb nothing and allow all the colors to get back to us as one. Black, as we know, absorbs all light.. it is the absense of light and color being reflected into our eyes that allows us to register it as black.

Incidentally, the easiest way to imagine that we all see close to the same color is that it is the same wavelength of light reaching our cornea and visual cortex. Seeing as how we are the same species and genetically very similar, it can be deduced that most of us probably interpret them similarly. However there are clearly some who dont, which may be caused by genetic mutations as opposed to differences in subconscious constructs of perspective.