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:
“The trouble with grown-ups was that under the magnificent shell of adulthood, just under,
Waited the baby full of tantrums.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.”
—James Dickey (b. 1923)
“The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.”
—Malcolm X (1925–1965)
“... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)