Safety Orange first emerged as a legal color standard in the US in the 1950s in technical manuals and federal regulations; today, it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. The color is a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures coded as worthy of care – and those deemed dangerous and expendable. This article uses the color orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in 21st-century US public life and to ponder what orange tells us about the relationship between phenomena often viewed as unrelated: information networks, climate data science, pandemic crisis, neoliberal policy, racist violence, and socially engaged art.

安全橙在1950年代首先作为技术上的颜色标准出现在美国的技术手册和联邦法规中。今天，它在恐怖，大流行和环境警报系统中最为明显；交通管制；工作安全；和大规模监禁。颜色是国家监督和放弃，资本主义过度和渎职的极端两极的标志。其空前的饱和度可对那些被编码为值得关注的尸体，邻里和基础设施以及被视为危险且消耗惨重的那些尸体进行追踪。本文使用橙色作为理论上的解释关键，以对21世纪美国公共生活中安全和护理的不均衡分布进行理论分析，并思考橙色告诉我们的现象之间的关系，这些现象通常被认为是不相关的：信息网络，气候数据科学，