Geoff

I then found out that those console colours are hardcoded into the kernel, in a palette of 8 named colours, with "white" conveniently naming the gray colour. This seems to have happened many years ago, but that doesn't place it lower on the stupid scale.

Not stupid, just conforming to ancient standards. The original ANSI standard devices would increase color intensity for the "bold" option (there was only one font). Combine the codes for "bold" and "white" to get actual white, and expect the unbold "yellow" to be amber, even brownish on some terminals.

yes :-) a while ago I thought to experiment with the C-A-f1 console, to have black text on white instead of the washed out gray on black (or sometimes dirty dark green). I then found out that those console colours are hardcoded into the kernel, in a palette of 8 named colours, with "white" conveniently naming the gray colour. This seems to have happened many years ago, but that doesn't place it lower on the stupid scale. In any case, I eventually worked out how to achieve black on actual white on the console, and that it's not worth fighting for.

Is there an easy way for me to have the (beta2) XFCE desktop icon labels text in black?
Just a vanilla installation with everything default.

You'll need to create a .gtkrc-2.0 file in your user directory.  Here's an example.  Pick and choose the parts you want:

style "xfdesktop-icon-view" { 

    XfdesktopIconVIew::cell-spacing = 6 
    XfdesktopIconView::cell-padding = 6 
    XfdesktopIconView::cell-text-width-proportion = 2.5

    XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0
	XfdesktopIconView::selected-label-alpha = 0

    base[NORMAL] = "#626D31" 
    base[SELECTED] = "#A0A985" 
    base[ACTIVE] = "#A0A985" 

    fg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff" 
    fg[SELECTED] = "#DDDFD3" 
    fg[ACTIVE] = "#DDDFD3" 
} 

widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"

There is some additional Xfce Desktop related info in this post.

I have no idea what your talking about . . . I didn't know a kernel had a color!!  LOL!

(and I think whoever made the "white" kernel colour be gray should have a separate talking-to)