Baby Blue in Human Culture
Gender
- In Western culture, the color baby blue is often associated with baby boys (and baby pink for baby girls), particularly in clothing and linen and shoes. This is a recent tradition, however, and until the 1940s the convention was exactly the opposite: pink was considered the appropriate color for boys as the more masculine and "decided" while blue was the more delicate and dainty color and therefore appropriate for girls.
Law enforcement
- In the late 1960s, New Age philosopher Alan Watts, who lived in Sausalito, a suburb of San Francisco, suggested that police cars be painted baby blue and white instead of black and white. This proposal was implemented in San Francisco in the late 1970s. (In the late 1980s, the police cars of the San Francisco Police Department were repainted the usual black and white.) Watts also suggested that the police should wear baby blue uniforms because, he asserted, this would make them less likely to commit acts of police brutality than if they were wearing the usual dark blue uniforms. This proposal was never implemented.
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Famous quotes containing the words baby, blue, human and/or culture:
“A baby is a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you’re pregnant, or you’d probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother—how reading goes out the window and thinking too.”
—Erica Jong (20th century)
“Debussy—A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)