"Is It Time To Reappropriate Pink?"

"It isn't just young boys who eventually come to reject pretty pink frills and — by extension — girliness. By elementary school, PFD is no longer the norm among girls.

In a review of research on the development of gender identity, May Ling Halim and colleagues write that only about 30 to 40 percent of girls in the post-kindergarten years identify as "traditional" girls or as having interests that are typically associated with girls or women. Many instead reject the girliness they'd once embraced, with up to half labeling themselves as tomboys... The trouble is that "pinkifying" the nonfrivolous (think pink power tools and pink Legos) merely marks the hers, in some ways confirming that "neutral" was his all along."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/11/10/362980907/is-it-time-to-reappropriate-pink

This makes me think about what makes having an oppressed and disrespected identity so, so, daily and long-term exhausting is that there are all sorts of social pressures encouraging you to push it away and claim to be something else, and then political pressures to hold it close and pridefully and despite-fully, and the being-you-as-you-are gets so buried in all that that it can be impossible to ever know. It's this constant personal evolution toward a place in which one's identity can be stable while feeling safe and true and nourishing.

This is also why I love Dear White People, because it taps into that struggle.