You may be thinking: “How is a color going to oppress me?” However, if you’re thinking this, it’s clear that it’s already drilling into your mind. You’ve been socially rewired by the patriarchy.
The human mind often associates feelings and moods with colors. For example, red probably makes you think of love and romance, or blood and anger. However, it’s been becoming increasingly obvious that blue is often oppressive. Color language is essentially using colors to subconsciously force malevolent ideas into your brain, a form of subliminal messaging. It’s used in marketing frequently, but it’s being used as a tool for oppression lately.
First, and perhaps most obviously, is the connotations with boys. Boys are blue, and girls are pink. This is the results of marketing schemes by corporations to reinforce gender roles. Clearly, evidenced by feminist lingo such as “pink tax“, it’s getting to us. Feminism itself is being corrupted by this idea that pink represents girls and femininity, and we need to fight it back. Before Hitler, pink represented boys, and blue represented girls. However, Hitler used pink to label out homosexuals, and thus it became a color to represent “femininity”. Since then, the organizations have been hijacking this trend and using it to persuade women into buying more expensive, pink products.
My next point is more to do with race, a statistical minority in America: POC. The police are often represented by the color blue, hence “Blue Lives Matter”, a movement that MTV aptly addressed with a video (now removed due to alt-right objection), saying policemen aren’t born with blue skin. The phrase “Blue Lives Matter” was constructed to trivialize and counterattack the “Black Lives Matter” movement. The color blue, in this instance, is being used to terrify and suppress black people, who are facing shocking police brutality in America.
I attempted to ask several people about how they felt about the color blue, to see if they had been subject to the subliminal messaging, and my amateur data tended to chalk the preference of the color blue up to men and white people.
At this point, a more skeptical part of you might be kicking in and thinking “Hold on, how can a color really be a tool of oppression?” This is perfectly reasonable, but may I remind you, in today’s political climate the Alt-Right have been using almost anything they can against us. Pepe became a hate symbol, we saw Trash Dove take a similar fate, and hell, even milk is being corrupted with Nazi symbolism. So, it’s not that hard to imagine marketing and advertising being subtly used to instill certain emotions in certain minorities. Ultimately, we have to take a stand against this, and you should learn to recognize when color language is being used to manipulate you.
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