Is black considered a color?

Isn't black or white considered a tone instead of a color, how can these levels of brightness be colors?

• Grey is also a tone, but I would sooner accept that more as a color.

• Answer:

  This type of discussion is fine for an art student and more closely resembles the philosophical arguments regarding religious minutae. Like biblical scholars that would argue, for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. When it comes to the practical applications of color to a work of art, the artist is NOT hung up on the semantics of what he or she is doing. Terms like color, tone, hue, tint, value, intensity, shade are meaningless and have no absolute definitions. What the artist has to be aware of when mixing paint and using those terms, also has to remember that the eye sees these colors in a very different way and the terms no longer apply. At least, they don't apply in the same way. Here's an example. The question is often asked about whether black and white are colors. People pipe in saying that they are not and offer scientific evidence that they are not, "technically," colors. But when I am at the store, selecting pigments from which I will later mix into the exact look I want, I see a jar or tube of black, or white, right along side a tube of cerulean blue, alizerin crimson, cadmium yellow, yellow ocher, slate blue or whatever, I don't care about the science of optics and all that color theory. If I anticipate the need for a tube of black, whether to use in a blend, or straight and pure right out of the container, those terms mean nothing to me. The black or white tubes are just more colors from which to select. Let me put it in even simpler terms. Say someone wants to paint the walls of his house. He goes to the home improvement store and tells the clerk that his color selection is white. Is the clerk going to refuse to sell the paint on the basis that white is not, tecnically a color?