Anyone that changes colour of emoji are weird.
I think it’s weird not to use a skin colour emoji. An everyday form of prejudice is the assumption that white is the default. Black or brown is an exotic/diverse category. That other people have odd customs and social norms, but our customs and religions are normal.
It’s even worse in design where the default human we design for is a man, hence women struggling with phone sizes that are too large for their hands. I think anything that helps break away from these default assumptions is good.
We already know from the Simpsons that yellow is a stand-in for white so it’s not neutral. There’s a white skin colour emoji, and by not using it when black/brown people use the other emojis, you’re refusing to acknowledge that you too have a non-neutral, non-default skin colour.
But I don’t want to choose my emojis based on the colour of my skin, I’d prefer to use something “neutral”, and while yellow as you said is not really neutral, it’s the closest thing we have to a neutral colour from all available options. I also don’t think unicode requires that the unmodified emoji be rendered as being yellow (correct me if I’m mistaken), and it’s probably apple and google who just decided that their fonts should render them as being yellow. I imagine one could with another font make them be magenta or some other color.
I think it was a mistake to go with yellow in the first place and I see the case for changing it to magenta/green/anything.
But I think when we’re representing people or human hands it’s necessary to allow for skin colour, and by not doing so we’re needlessly erasing people. I’m just not a fan of the ‘it’s racist to bring up race’ argument, which is not what you’re saying but the original comment was veering towards
My former boss always made sure we knew she was white when she used emojis. I’m like, lady- we all see you. Even the people who work remotely see you via Zoom meetings. You don’t need to let us know you’re white. Why are you making an effort?
Emojis are contributing to racism https://imgur.com/gallery/871WEZh
I read an article which stated that by Apple introducing the colorized emoji, they actually increased racism. The author said that people feel awkward not using the different skin tones since they’re there, but by doing so they expose their race, which opens them up to racist attacks and makes them stand out of the group. I’d argue that it’s just exposing the racism that was already inherent in the community, but I didn’t write the article.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. It could reduce racism by making people of color more visible. Most racists aren’t inherently pro-white, rather they’re picking some arbitrary criteria for us vs. the others. As a result, making it visible to them that their ‘us’ is lots of people of color, they’ll drop that nonsense criteria pretty quickly.
But of course, chicken-egg and all that, people experiencing racism may not necessarily want to expose their race for the reasons you named, and so they don’t become collectively visible.
It’s all The Simpson’s fault. They shouldn’t have given people of colour human skin tones. Apu should be yellow.
I like the default one because it makes me feel like I’m from the Simpsons
