But if there was a single color in European history indelibly associated with supreme political leadership it was Tyrian purple, a dye made from the secretions of a particular Mediterranean shellfish soaked in urine and associated with the Phoenicians from Tyre from the fifteenth century BCE. It is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid and became associated with Roman emperors after Julius Caesar, by which time the dye was worth more than gold by weight. Originally all the ruling classes of Rome wore some variant of purple in their clothing, but by the 4^th century CE only emperors could wear purple and people contravening the rule were summarily executed. In fact, Roman generals who had been awarded a ‘triumph’ against a significant enemy force, were allowed to wear a purple toga for the day whilst they paraded through Rome, often with their faces painted red, as if a god, with a slave behind them on the chariot reminding the general that he was not a god, just in case they got the wrong idea.

That notion of colors as a device to differentiate and discipline the population was also common in Japan where, from 603 CE, kinjiki or forbidden colors, restricted the use of orange to aristocrats. Commoners were required to wear grey or perhaps blue if they had access to indigo dyeing. And indigo was associated with many burial customs around the world and represented great prestige amongst males of the Tuareg tribe in North Africa and then became the primary color of Napoleon’s infantry before finally being represented most strongly by denim jeans or ‘democracy in fashion’ as Georgio Armani suggested (quoted in St. Clair, 2016: 192).

Intriguingly, blue was the color of barbarians, as far as the Romans were concerned, especially the woad-covered Britons that faced Julius Caser in 54 and 55 BCE, and it wasn’t really until the 12^th century that blue became fashionable and associated with leaders such as the mythical King Arthur and images of the Virgin Mary (Pastoureau, 2017: 86-9). And if you’ve ever wondered why British police uniforms are blue, it was because at their foundation, as the Metropolitan Police in 1829, the uniform was specifically designed in blue. Sir Robert Peel wanted the police uniform to contrast with the red of the military to represent a civil, not a military force. Perhaps the most intriguing national flag to combine red and blue is that of Haiti. In 1803 the Haitian revolutionary, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, allegedly tore the white panel out of the French tricolour and had the red (representing Haitian people of color who were of mixed European and African descent) and blue (representing Black Haitian people) sewn together to represent the removal of the French White colonists and slave owners.

Many of the Haitian people who were of mixed European and African descent defined themselves or were defined by others as being ‘yellow’ in contrast to White and Black Haitians (Girard, 2010: 62-64), and yellow was regarded by the Chinese Emperors as the most prestigious color and associated with bravery, so much so that ‘common people and officials’ were forbidden from wearing yellow (St Clair, 2016: 65). In many European societies, cowardice and ‘being yellow’ were virtual synonyms. Yet the West, and most certainly the British, talk of ‘Golden days’, ‘Golden handshakes/Goodbyes’ or even ‘Golden Girls and Boys’, and that dichotomy between yellow as valued and valueless, continues into a Western association with blond hair representing both great beauty and great stupidity.

Yellow in the British Royal Navy was a symbol of death, such that all executions were ritualized and arranged under a yellow flag — but it is not clear why the color yellow is associated with executions in particular and cowardice in general, at least in the Western world. It may be that the common feature of executions was the involuntary urination induced by fear, and the yellow color of urine became associated with fear. Pastoureau (2019) suggests that during the European feudal period, yellow was associated with honor and beauty but gradually became associated with ill-health through urine analysis. Yellow subsequently became linked to envy, lying, and most importantly in these circumstances, treachery. In that context in the late nineteenth century ‘yellow books’ were categorized, originally in France and then throughout the West, as those which contained something unsavory, literally a contamination between the covers. Hence many White European and North American societies warned of a ‘yellow peril’ at various times because of both the alleged color of East Asian skin and as a consequence of their apparent ‘contamination’ of the White homeland — which to racists clearly warranted expulsion.

Perhaps the neatest rejoinder to this concoction of color and racism was produced by Stokely Carmichael, one of the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and subsequently a leader in the Black Power movement and Black Panther Party, who said of the American draft for the Vietnam War (when African-Americans comprised 21 percent of U.S. forces and 29 percent of the U.S. Army) that it was “white people sending Black people to make war on yellow people to defend land they stole from red people” (quoted in Roy, 2019: 278-8).

Color, then, seems an irredeemably political phenomenon, but it is also highly personal. As Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and stoic philosopher, noted “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts” (Meditations Book 5). Actually, one of the earliest known references to color and temperaments came from Hippocrates who associated two of the four ‘known’ substances (air, water, fire, and earth) with yellow bile (fire) and black bile (earth), and Galen adopted this to associate yellow with the choleric, and black with the melancholic, character. As Case and Phillipson (2004) suggest, the original quaternity was subsequently crucial not just to the development of astrology and alchemy but also to the way Jung categorized consciousness and character.

If much of Jung’s (1953-83) original work was conceptual in intent and had little empirical support, that model has become common amongst some leadership development approaches and has been adopted and adapted into all kinds of psychometric tests and leadership development programmes, from Myers-Briggs MBTI® to Primary Colours®. The latter, in a book modestly entitled, Leadership: All You Need to Know, by Pendleton and Furnham (2016), links red to the interpersonal domain, blue to the operational domain, and green to the strategic domain, leaving white as the ‘Leading’ area at the centre of the overlapping Venn diagram. And rather like its intellectual antecedent, the model claims ‘25 years of research’ but is unable or unwilling to explain the details of this research. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats also uses a color scheme for its metaphorical approach, associating white with ‘facts’, yellow with optimism, black with risk, red with emotion, green with creativity, and blue with control. In this approach the traditional criticisms of contributions are, in theory, negated by acknowledging that from the perspective of the color that line of thought represents, it is appropriate and should be acknowledged for representing a different – but legitimate – approach. As so often in this arena, the model comes without the usual academic uncertainty and claims that it “may well be the most important change in human thinking for the past twenty-three hundred years” (1985/2000: IX).

Well, that put Arendt, Aristotle, de Beauvoir, Einstein, Kant, Plato, Socrates, and Wollstonecraft in their place, especially given the traditional absence of logical proof or empirical evidence for the claim. Indeed, if there is a finding here it’s that a correlation does exist between the evidence and the claim, but it’s a negative correlation — an inversion of Karl Popper’s (1959) theory of falsification for science — perhaps a reppoP assertion: the greater the claim to the truth the less evidence of the truth there is. But we shouldn’t allow facts to color our beliefs, should we?