Next time you're in a shop to look at clothes. Take two different Black shirts or pants from two different manufacturers and see if you don't think the colors are not the same.
Same with whites. Or Reds, blues, yellows, etc.
The reason being, all colors are a blend of colors.
White has two base colors, blue or black....go figure.
Oh, no question about it. I'm a photographer so I'm aware that colours are far more complicated than people usually think.
The colour orange wasn't given a name in English until relatively recently (when people started importing the fruit from Spain - "naranja" or "a norange", which was corrupted to "an orange" and gave name to the colour.) It wasn't that people couldn't see orange things, just that they considered them red or yellow.
In China, the traditional Mandarin word "qing" signifies both blue and green, which were considered different shades of the same colour.
I tend to think in terms of light, where white is what you get when you mix everything and black is an absence of any light at all. In paint, it's different, of course, mixing everything typically gives you a murky dark brown and neither white nor black can truly exist.
I still find it interesting that a grey tv screen can be made to look like it is displaying black (or near-black) - a colour darker than the unlit screen, which is of course impossible and an optical illusion.
