ANSI color and manpages

I don't know whose idea it was to enable all that ANSI colour crap by
default. (Is it only RedHat that does it, or do other distributions do
it too?) What's worse, the colors seem set up for the "cool" look of
black backgrounds, with lots of white and pale yellow. Try using a
light background in your xterms: all man pages become unreadable!

I've managed to fix ls:
    unalias ls
    COLOR none (in /etc/DIR_COLORS)
    rm /etc/profile.d/*color*

But man is still broken. I've tried setting the environment variable
GROFF_NO_SGR. I've added -c to the NROFF setting in /etc/man.config.
I've set TERM to vt100. I still get the goddamn white and pale yellow
text. (Yes, I did logout/login after making the changes.) Can anyone
tell me how to disable the !@^%#@&^$%*^& colors? If I can expunge all
signs of SGR ANSI color from my system I'll be happy.

-s