I think that the history goes all the back to the early work in DC not AC!
I think you have that backwards White is inclusive and black is absent of color, perhaps you where thinking excluded.
Newton proved that a light spectrum existed in White light and that help set up other things.
White light contains light of all frequencies. In that sense, white is a
combination of all colors. Black objects absorb light of all frequencies.
This means that very little light is reflected from them. Black is the
absence of light.
As far as the absence of color is concerned... you know that if you combine
pigments or dyes of different colors, you don't end up with white. Dyes
and pigments work by absorbing light in certain frequency ranges, and
transmitting or reflecting light of other frequencies. If two different
dyes are combined, the mixture absorbs light characteristic of BOTH dyes,
and transmits light of the remaining frequencies. If you mix togtether
dyes that are truly complementary, the mixture will absorb light of all
frequencies, and thus be black. (In practice the best you can do is get a
muddy brown, because the different dyes are only approximately
complementary.) So it depends on what you mean by "absence of color."
We perceive colors because we have three types of "cone" cells in our
retinas, each of which is most sensitive to certain frequency ranges.
These ranges correspond pretty much to red, green, and blue. Our brain
interprets the different intensities of the signals from each type of cone
cell to decide what color it sees.
