You may remember the story of how I convinced my mother that my brother Jean was colorblind for years, but looking back, it was a rather basic attempt at an intriguing concept. It’s not particularly impressive to trick a six-year-old; I know when I was young you could have told me god was a dog, clouds were sky whales, and the little mermaid was my real mom and I would have believed it. The youth have a propensity towards suspending disbelief.
So when I saw the chance for a redo in my high school biology class freshman year, I jumped on it.
Our teacher had assigned a project where we researched genetic disorders and presented our findings to the class, and luckily (for me, not so much for him), my desk mate Ryan was colorblind.
This gave him automatic dibs and he decided to choose it. Ryan was a very studious fellow, an academic who loved biology above all else. He had perfect grades, could explain the Krebs’s cycle to a rock, so of course the only source more trusted in that class was our teacher. What the other students didn’t know was Ryan was just as mischievous as I was.
Colorblind tests kind of look like pictures of circles of the nerds candy mixed together, juxtaposing contrasting colors together in various hues. There’s always a number in the middle that the colorblind generally have trouble making out because all the splotches look the same, but people without the disorder can make it out instantly- it seems very obvious. I suggested to Ryan we make a fake test and put it after a few slides of normal tests with the class calling out the numbers so when we got to it, no one would be able to see any number there.
We got the teacher in on it and agreed beforehand that we would ‘see’ the number 7 in the circle. It all went like clockwork. Students went through their presentations as Ryan and my anticipation built, anxiously awaiting his turn. The timing worked perfectly with Ryan up as the last speaker for the day, meaning our audience would already be a little fried. Everyone seemed a little dead until we got to the tests at the end of his slide show. Everyone was strangely very excited to reaffirm what they already knew, that they were in the majority of the population who could see color normally. We were all yelling out numbers, and the further we got, the more the fervor grew.
“EIGHTEEN!”
“FOUR!”
“TWENTY ONE!”
But then we got to the last slide.
“seven!”
The room was dead-quiet. Everyone blinked and hesitantly looked from side to side, curious about their apparently visually impaired classmates but too afraid to admit they couldn’t see it themselves.
“...Do you guys not see it?”
The teacher really sold it; she relished her part in the joke and the class was in the palm of her hand. If high school biology ever ended up not working out for her, I can certify she has an easy fallback as a movie star or a secret agent. For all I know, she’s already been both.
I looked around the room suspiciously, making and breaking eye contact as I pleased, daring the other students to say they could see the seven, forcing them to the defensive, accusing them all of trying to mess with me: a layered deception.
Ryan calmed us all down, calling out “alright, alright guys, stop it, let me finish!” The unusually shrill plea got the class’s attention. Surely Ryan would clear up all confusion.
He moved to the next slide, his last slide, and read the last paragraph to us. “Actually guys, something a lot of people don’t know is that around 85% of the American population has a defect in their third cone due to bottleneck effects with European migration. Most Americans can’t completely see green.”
“I never knew that!” the teacher exclaimed.
The rest of the class nodded sagely, satisfied with their new knowledge. They packed up their bags as the bell rang, no doubt ready to go home and teach their friends and brothers and sisters that they too were colorblind.
I don’t know how many people from that class might still think they’ll never truly see green, but what I do know is in that moment, my plan had overwhelmingly succeeded: we convinced a whole class of high schoolers they were colorblind.
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