Opus 2025-666: A Winter Question

Why did God make snow white?

No, I don’t mean the fairytale princess or the caricature created by Disney.  My question has to do with the color of snow.

Was God making a racist statement?

In case you’re new to people who write with an IQ of higher than 40 that was a rhetorical question.  Since God created all races, it’s kind of hard to believe that He would be racist.  Since Jesus most likely was Semitic and had a certain look about him, it’s doubtful that Norwegians are any higher on the racial hierarchy than people of the Middle East.  While it’s true that we don’t know for sure what the coloring was of people in those days we can look at modern distribution of population and be pretty sure that Jesus did not have blonde hair and blue eyes.

But back to our question…  Why is snow white?

Well, let’s look at the physics of the matter.  White is a reflection of all the colors of the spectrum.  Black is an absorption of all the colors of the spectrum.  So when you look at the color white, you are actually looking at all races mixed together.  Or you could say all race is rejected depending on how you want to look at it.

Why did God design the universe so snow needed to be reflective?  I’m guessing it has to do with the absorption of energy and the generation of heat.  Winter is a time of cooling.  It’s a time of the Earth renewing itself.  In order to do that there are certain temperatures that seem to be better.  If snow were black, it would absorb all the heat of the sun and melt very quickly.  Black cars are hotter in the summer than white cars.  I don’t know what that would do to runoff or to the temperature of the Earth around us.  Instead of being reflected in light, the sun‘s energy would be absorbed and warm the Earth.  Talk about climate change!

I don’t know if there are emotional contents to the color of snow.  Do all people tend to be more optimistic and up in a light atmosphere?  I believe I’ve heard that some cultures wear white to funerals as an expression of morning.  It’s possible that different colors affect different people or peoples in ways that others might not understand.  The fact that snow is winter and winter is depressing to many people might say to me that the reflection of white light is encouraging rather than depressing.

If that’s racist, then deal with it.  Just as snow is omnipresent once you get away from the tropics, so racism is a part of every culture if you define it correctly, or incorrectly as the case may be.

So go ahead and dream of a white Christmas.  Like all dreams it has elements of reality, but people forget what it’s really like driving through the slush, shoveling the sidewalks, coming in covered with cold, wet, white stuff, and all the other mysterious non-joys of winter time.  In case you have never lived in snow country let me advise you not to go out to pick up the newspaper in your stocking feet.

Merry Christmas.

homo unius libri