Who is at risk of color blindness?

Answer 1

In a sense no one is at risk at all for color blindness; it is a genetic condition that you either have or do not have. It is not an illness against which you must protect yourself, or that poses a non-zero risk to people who are not color blind. Men are more likely to be color blind, because it is a recessive gene on the X chromosome, with no corresponding gene on the Y chromosome to keep it from appearing. Women can be color blind, but only if the father is color blind and the mother is either color blind or a carrier of the recessive gene on one of her X chromosomes. My brother happens to be red-green color blind, and I have normal color perception. This indicates that our mother is a carrier; one of her X chromosomes has the recessive gene and the other does not. Our father also had normal color perception, but regarding my brother and me, this is irrelevant; we got his Y chromosome, not his X.

Color blindness does not involve an actual form of blindness, or an inability to perceive light. There are some physical conditions that may lead to different kinds of actual blindness in the eye, and some of these conditions also impare color perceptions. Technically, these are forms of blindness and not color blindness as we generally use the term.

It is a fallacy that all color blind people see everything in black, white and shades of gray. It appears that only a small percentage of people dealing with color blindness have this condition. It is a fallacy that red-green color blind people see red and green objects as gray. The truth is that people who have any form of color deficiency will have some difficulty identifying or matching a great many colors, and not just the colors that are misleadingly attached to the form of deficiency that they have. This is so because very few colors in our everyday world are completely pure. There are infinitely many mixes and combinations of colors in the objects that we see throughout the day. A person with a red and/or green perception problem will have some difficulty perceiving colors that have any mixes of red and/or green in them.