⭐ COLOR‑CODED TRIGGERS & SYMBOLISM COMPROMISING PHYSICALITY & SPIRITUALITY
- Jessica GGB Holter
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
by Jessica Holter
Goofing off while sorting through my chaotic Google Drive, I found an old letter — one of those historical excerpts you save because something about it feels important, even if you don’t know why at the time. I only just noticed a detail I had missed for years: blue and red were considered the most valued colors by some early Americans. Not because they were patriotic, but because of what those colors meant in their world.
The passage described Indigenous communities through the eyes of a European observer. What struck me wasn’t the nudity or the copper or the braids — it was this line:
“They did not value gold because of its color… and rate blue and red above all other colors.”
Blue and red. The same two colors that would later dominate the American flag, political maps, and half the branding in this country.
I’m not saying one caused the other. I’m saying the overlap is interesting.
The excerpt went on to describe how they prized blue crystals, little bells, and copper sheets — how mirrors made them laugh, how gold meant nothing to them, how identity was expressed through hair, sound, and ornamentation rather than wealth.
Reading it again, I realized: color, sound, and symbol have always been emotional technologies. Long before marketing departments. Long before political parties. Long before the rainbow became a brand.
And that’s how I ended up writing this blog — tracing how color hits the body, how sound hits the spine, and how symbols get rewritten until we forget what they used to mean.
Color hits your eyes. Sound remote‑controls your spine. Together, the instrument — the bones and the skin you live in — falls out of tune. Your essence becomes ill‑at‑ease.
It is unnerving to hear and see two things that do not agree. Doggon it! They done gone and pit your favorite colors against each other, and now you can watch them disagree from L.A. to Capitol Hill.
When I was a kid, they used to train us to recognize when something didn’t belong. Remember that little TV jingle?
“One of these things is not like the other…”
By the end of the song, you had to pick out the thing that didn’t match. Simple. Clear. It taught your brain to notice when something was off.
But these days? They blur the lines on purpose. Everything is mixed together — a group of everything, nothing matching — and humans have an innate need to belong. When everything is included, everything becomes permissible. And “agreeing to this gives us permission” becomes the fine print nobody reads.
“The carved image is not the spirit.” — Yoruba Proverb
Even emotional color wheels don’t agree on the emotions evoked by blue and red. But they seem to agree white is not a color, ’cause it’s not on the wheel. The study of color is interesting — the more I read about it, for the sole purpose of this blog, the more color‑struck I become.
“You shall not turn to idols or make for yourselves molten gods.” — Leviticus 19:4
Here are the standard emotional associations used in branding, design, and psychology:
Red = urgency
Blue = trust
Green = nature
Yellow = caution
Black = power
White = neutrality
Rainbow = diversity
Color programming is powerful. Most of the colors, in fact, group together in certain ways to push a personal preference or natural trait into the mainstream — handled as if it were a political agenda. That’s the part that fascinates me: how a symbol can be used so consistently that it becomes shorthand for something it never originally meant.
⭐ Practical Color Theory (The Part They Don’t Teach in School)
“Look at this image, a painted puppet… yet the ignorant cling to it.” — Dhammapada 147
We can link the JSTOR article for anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole of color studies and theories. It’s funny when you think about what they do teach in school — and what they absolutely don’t. They’ll tell you to wear a suit to a job interview, but nobody pulls you aside and says, “Wear blue so the interviewer is more receptive to you.” They don’t teach you that red raises the stakes, green calms the room, or yellow makes people anxious. They don’t teach you how color can tilt a conversation before you even open your mouth.
We really ought to demand that more practical skills be taught in the schools we pay for.
Scientists have been studying the effects of color for over a century. You might enjoy this report — here’s the link if you want to read it for yourself:
The first thing I noticed in the report is that the color red makes people stupid. I might agree, though not for the same reasons. I think red is arresting — compelling — making you look too long to pay attention to much else, like the lady in red in The Matrix. Red is the side show of the color wheel: Look over here. Focus on how you feel. I use it a lot in my romantic comedy theater promotions. In my mind, red is the color of the heart. It represents love and desire — the color that makes you put all else aside, if only for a moment.
⭐ The Rainbow Re‑Coded
Like the rainbow.
A universal childhood symbol — wonder, imagination, sky magic — re‑coded into a specialized adult symbol. Not stolen. Not owned. Just… reassigned. A natural resource monopoly. A gang, and the rainbow is their do‑rag.
My partner — before she was my manager, before she was my everything — tried to correct that imbalance. For Oakland Pride, she added brown and Black to the rainbow. A simple truth‑telling gesture. If the colors represent the people, and we are being inclusive… well, you would think the spectrum would reflect the whole spectrum. It’s anyone’s guess why that flag didn’t fly. But symbols have politics long before people do, and sometimes the truth inside a symbol is the last thing anyone wants to update.
She had been using that expanded rainbow long before it appeared anywhere else — as early as the mid‑1990s in the Bay Area, where Oakland Pride has its own history and its own cultural identity. Her version was loved locally, and when she passed, the City of Oakland honored her with a proclamation and a day in her name. That’s how deeply her work lived in the community.
In 2017, Executive Director Amber Hikes introduced a Philadelphia version of the Pride flag that also added Black and Brown stripes. It became widely recognized, but the expanded colors have not been universally adopted across all Pride events or organizations. Many major cities still host multiple Pride celebrations throughout the year — different dates, different neighborhoods, different histories — each reflecting its own community, culture, and traditions.
⭐ Symbols Travel — And They Get Rewritten
“They are but names you have named.” — Qur’an 53:23
Symbols travel. They migrate. They get repurposed. One of the oldest symbols on Earth — found in ancient India, China, Greece, Indigenous American cultures, African textiles, Buddhist temples, Hindu art, Jain manuscripts, and even Neolithic pottery — was later reassigned a completely different meaning in the 20th century. Its origins weren’t even in the culture that later claimed it. That’s how powerful symbolic rebranding can be: a peaceful symbol with thousands of years of history can be overwritten in a single generation through repetition, visibility, and emotional programming.
“You love the brand. Does the brand love you?” — Jessica Holter
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