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:
“However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The white dominant culture seemed to think that once the Indians were off the reservations, they’d eventually become like everybody else. But they aren’t like everybody else. When the Indianness is drummed out of them, they are turned into hopeless drunks on skid row.”
—Elizabeth Morris (b. c. 1933)