The Exclusivity of Pink

It’s been a couple months since the start of the school year, but I haven’t yet forgotten the neon-bright pink backpacks sported by New Student Program leaders during Orientation (that lovely period of high-stress, transition and deluge of information for first-years).

I don’t doubt the pink backpacks had utilitarian purpose. They probably helped peer mentors carry around important things, and with how bold, bright and loud the color was, I wouldn’t be surprised if it made it easy for first-years to identify the student leaders as a resource. Probably, it worked well for more than one first-year to do just that.

Nonetheless, I still question the decision to use hot pink as a color for identifying student leaders who represented Scripps as a student body early in the year. I’ll put a disclaimer here: I don’t mean to discriminate amongst colors, nor ascribe an arbitrary value to any of them based solely on the societal connotations (in this case, a particularly effeminate quality). As a color in and of itself, I’m sure bright pink is beautiful. It deserves to color the world or backpacks as much as blue, green, or purple. But that doesn’t erase the fact that colors do signify specific ideas within society, and it doesn’t eliminate the responsibility we have to be be critical of what messages we are conveying within context when using colors–like when choosing the colors for school or leadership paraphernalia.

What the backpacks signified to me the first time I spotted them: loud. girls. girly-girls. exclusivity. posse. extroversion. female.

Pretty much, it brought me back to those wondrous days of high school and the visions of clique-y-ness contained. Exactly what I would have wanted to be reminded of as a first-year coming onto a brand new campus! I don’t really want to assert that wearing pink backpacks made peer mentors and team leaders into a clique, but the image of a group of assertive girls, in roles akin to camp leaders, holding onto the straps of their backpacks in bold pink was rather striking. It is possible that I am the only one taken that aback by the pink backpacks NSE leaders wore during Orientation. But I want to make the point that pink backpacks, combined with California Dreamin’ as the orientation theme, and the context of Scripps as an all-womens college makes for a kind of girly nuance. Katy Perry’s image of California girls: unforgettable, daisy dukes, bikinis on top; sunkissed skin, so hot. Mm.

What is this all coming to? Am I saying pink is bad? We shouldn’t listen ever to Katy Perry? No. Listening to Katy Perry can be fun sometimes (if we keep mass media and cultural messages in the back of our minds like good critical consumers). I can see how there are things to be valued in the hyperfeminine notions conveyed by hot bold pink: it’s not bad to be fun, girly even, proud and confident of it and your female identity. Bright pink is assertive. Heck, even I like the color of bright pink myself–and sometimes want to flaunt it.

I don’t think it’s bad to be a certain type of female, and we don’t have to reject that notion of femininity just to assuage negative connotations of it. Maybe that’s what the New Orientation team was trying to communicate when they deliberately picked pink to display themselves.

Except not all women, students at Scripps included, identify as hot-pink-fashion female. Some students don’t even identify as female.

It’s all good to be proud of being female in a mainstream way, and that’s something individuals can choose to demonstrate in their own lifestyle. Just, with pink backpacks dictating that this is something associated with school leaders, and California Dreamin’ telling new students that this is the image of “female”” to aspire to as women, I wonder if not a one first-year who didn’t identify with hot pink or the ideas conveyed by it felt somewhat confronted or pressured by a model of something they couldn’t or didn’t want to be. I wonder if anyone else felt discomfited and excluded by the decision to brand NSE with the color pink. This is Scripps we’re talking about, right?

Next time, I would say, forget the pink backpacks and just go with sage green.