It’s not that Allie Wineland couldn’t see the pattern. It was right there, just a few feet away from her, a system of interlocking circles and puckered diamonds crawling over the upholsteries of the chairs in the Learning Commons in the Herman B Wells Library’s West Tower.
The chairs over there – they’re two different colors, and I can see the pattern, but it’s so faint,” the freshman said. “I know there’s a pattern, but I couldn’t be like ... for me it’s like two different shades of red.”
Wineland is colorblind, and there are multiple degrees of separation between the “actual” colors on the chairs – maroon and a gold-orange color – and what she called red, which most of the world might call a sort of muddied yellow. Somewhere in between the two realities, she had a mix of intuition and logic by association, a result of 18 years of red-green colorblindness, telling her the colors on the chair were red or something near it.
She’s far from alone in her color blindness. While it’s far more common in men than women, it still affects a substantial chunk of the world’s population: the National Eye Institute estimates 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women with Northern European ancestry have red-green colorblindness, the ailment’s most common variety.
“When people find out you’re colorblind, there’s also one person wherever you’re talking that day who either is colorblind or knows somebody directly that’s colorblind,” she said. “You have secret bonds with other colorblind people.”
Colorblindness runs in Wineland’s family: her father has it, as does her grandmother and uncle on her mother’s side. That’s generally the case with colorblindness, as it’s passed down genetically. For the condition to manifest, it has to appear in all present X chromosomes; because anatomically female humans have two X chromosomes, they’re far less likely to be born colorblind. But because people on both sides of her family have colorblindness – and because her grandmother’s colorblindness made her mother a “carrier” – Wineland’s odds of being colorblind were higher.
“That’s what kind of freaks people out,” she said. “They’re like, ‘That’s magic.’ I’m like, ‘It’s genetics.’”
By this point, Wineland said, her colorblindness has become as much of a joke as anything among her immediate family – after all, they all grew up either colorblind or with a colorblind person in their immediate family. When Wineland was young and her family played board games, her father used the yellow game pieces because he could see them. These days, she sometimes has to call her sister, Abbie, a junior at Ball State, for fashion advice, because she can’t always tell what pieces match.
Occasionally they’ll run into a particularly comical situation, like when they called in a Verizon rep because their newly-arrived cable box wasn’t working. The culprit: her dad’s inability to distinguish between the colors of two cords and their proper destinations. The rep switched the cords and left.
Then there’s the humor inherent in the medical side of the equation: “The funniest thing is that
when you go to the eye doctor you have to take the colorblindness test, even if you’re already
colorblind,” she said. “There was one point – it was maybe ten years ago – my dad goes, ‘Listen. I’m 46 years old. I know I’m colorblind. I’m not going to take this test.’ I think it would be interesting if they someday came up with some sort of surgery to fix the cones – I think that’d be cool, but I also don’t know if I’d want it.”
Any other annoyances, Wineland said, are fairly inconsequential: missing out on color-related symbolism, as she did in a high school film literacy class; buying plenty of black clothes, because at least those are easy to match; getting beaten at “FIFA Soccer” video games because she can’t distinguish the red icon over a player’s head from the green grass of the field.
In fact, modern technology in general has trouble meshing with colorblindness. Green traffic lights appear bright white to her, as do green computer icons – to her, the Facetime icon on her computer screen looks like a white box with a barely-perceptible white camera silhouette in the center. Natural features like grass, on the other hand, look more “vibrant” – she still doesn’t see organic greens as others do, but she said it’s easier to recognize them as such without other context clues.
And while colorblindness may make it harder for her to edit photos on her computer or complement someone’s shirt with complete certainty of its shade, Wineland said there may be a reason many people don’t know the specifics of colorblindness: it’s just not a particularly debilitating condition.
“It’s like living with – if you had like no pinky, you’d be able to get used to it. It might be weird to everybody else, but like, it’s not going to hinder a lot of things. Of course, a pinky is probably more necessary than seeing a bunch of colors. (It’s) like your appendix. I like that analogy better."
