Per a basic dictionary definition, yellow is a component of light, the most luminous of the primary colors, occurring in the spectrum between green and orange, with a wavelength between 570 and 590 nanometers. Part of growing up in the United States is to eventually begin associating a handful of basic colors with racial categories and, along with them, prescriptive notions of race. Together with the cognate colors white, black, red, and brown, yellow has come to signify a major racial category in the United States. The etymology of “yellow,” in its simplest color sense, begins with the Old English _geolu_, which corresponds to the Old Saxon _gelo_, Low German _gel_, Middle Dutch _geluw_, and Indo-European _ghelwo_. The earliest written form occurs around AD 700 in what is among the first Anglo-Saxon alphabetical glossaries, the _Epinal Glossary_. The word appears in the Old English text _Beowulf_, when Wiglaf is about to join Beowulf to battle the dragon: “_hond rond gefeng, / geolwe linde_” (he seized the hand-round [shield], the yellow linden-wood). As an adjective applied to the human complexion, prior to indicating Asian people, “yellow” described the aged or diseased. In 1817, for example, Lord Byron wrote in his long...