I’m asking because as a light-skinned male, I always use the standard Simpsons yellow. I don’t really see other light-skinned people using an emoji that matches their skin tone, but often do see people of color use them. Maybe white people don’t naturally realize a need to be explicit with emoji skin-tone or perhaps it’s seen as implicitly identifying or requesting white privilege.
-
Is there a significance to using skin-tone emojis, and if so, what is it?
-
Assuming there might be a racial movement attached to the first question, how does my use of emojis, both Simpsons yellow and light-skin, interact with or contribute to that?
Note: I am an autistic white Latino-American cis-gendered man that aims to be socially just.
Autistic text stim: blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 !!
Use what you want to. Let others use what they want to. Don’t overthink it.
Some people are thrilled with the fact that they can make their little online avatar closer to their reality, others don’t give a damn, because they don’t want to define themselves by their virtual presence. At the end of the day, though, they’re just pixels. What you say and how you treat people is much more important than whatever little +1 icon gets attached.
Based
Indeed
There’s no significance because they are just fucking emojis.
Simpsons yellow
:D
Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned. It’s a nice contrasting color to show the emotion and they have always done a good job representing everyone while serving their goal: to convey emotion in text.
The push for representation in emoji’s always struck me as weird since they already represented everyone. I rarely see people using them who aren’t a bit too focused on skin color in their day-to-day life.
That, and I think they trace a direct lineage back to the original Harvey Ross Ball smiley face, which was also yellow.
Me, I don’t particularly care about matching emoji skintones to myself. Rather, I’m much more annoyed that I can’t tune the 🏍️ emoji to match the color of my motorcycle. What a rip off.
I don’t feel represented. There isn’t a badass chrome and black cruiser emoji that makes a loud-ass rumble when you open the message, so I’m stuck with the fast and quiet Supersport 🏍.
Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned.
I use those ones because they’re cloaer to the top of the list, therefore faster to scroll to when I’m choosing an emoji.
…since they already represented everyone.
Did they really? Because if that were the case we wouldn’t have different skin tones for emojis with people claiming they feel more represented by them or happy to use them because they have the same skin tone.
Yes, they did. The Canadian flag represents all Canadians. The BC province flag may represent me more closely, but it doesn’t stop the Canada flag from doing the same. While some people will be happy they can represent themselves more accurately to real life, it also makes for more exclusive use cases. I think there’s an argument to be made for keeping things simple and broadly usable.
I kinda like using emoji that are similar to my skintone. Not really making a statement, but somehow it feels a little more “me.” Hard to explain why it matters, it’s not like I won’t use the yellow ones if that’s all they have. Just kinda like “hehe, that’s a lil me in that message.”
There’s at least two things going on here:
A) a very mild case of the “white as default” part of white privilege. White people see themselves as default and use the default emoji.
2] the (often accurate) perception that white people who highlight their race unnecessarily do so out of racial pride, making self-use of a “white” emoji suspect.
I’m not saying these are the only two things at play, just the ones that occurr to me on first examinstion.
I just use the yellow one as I feel like they already represent everyone. I would definitely not feel any better about using a white emoji, I’d just feel like a racist trying to convince people that I’m better. I also like the yellow ones as it makes the standard to be anonymous about your skin colour. Or you could just use the outlined one for everything 🫥. Also the hole emoji is awesome 🕳️
And that was a way longer ramble then I intended 😀
And finally, good by 🖐️🖐🏻🖐🏼🖐🏽🖐🏾🖐🏿
P.S. Typing them all out the yellow one is also by far the most readeble. The white ones work very good on the black background I’m viewing this on but they probably just blend in to the background if your using a light theme. Maybe we should just type out all the variants? 🤷🤷🏻🤷🏼🤷🏽🤷🏾🤷🏿🤷♀️🤷🏻♀️🤷🏼♀️🤷🏽♀️🤷🏾♀️🤷🏿♀️🤷♂️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏼♂️🤷🏽♂️🤷🏾♂️🤷🏿♂️
I’m a guy and default to use the female 🤷most of the time because that’s what my phone gives me on some apps
I think that one 🤷 is meant to be gender neutral. 🤷♀️ & 🤷♂️ are less ambiguous.
My immediate opinion upon skin tone emoji being introduced was the mildest frustration: we’d had unified emoji for all Homo sapiens!
Then after seeing someone use their own skin tone for an emoji, I realized… oh, dang. They can feel represented now, potentially in a way they did not before.
I use yellow 100%. But not bad folks have options.
One neat thing is on Slack you may be able to see a hint of your company’s vibrant diversity if folks are reacting with all colors of emoji. Admittedly it could also look a little cluttered though maybe they are grouping reactions by symbol now.
On a related note, I’ve seen two people with very light (though non-white) skin tones use significantly darker skin tone emoji. One of those times I brought it up with someone else and they’re like “yeah what’s with that?!” Self image or eyesight related perhaps…
The original emojis were white before the yellow and darker tones were added in 2015. Look up Katrina Parrott for the backstory. In short, before yellow was the default, White was the only option, and that’s kinda racist, and was only 9 years ago.
Yellow was simply a neutral addition to emojis that matched well with the existing yellow smiley face (which that French asshole keeps charging people for).
Thanks for questioning your assumptions. Further reading if you’re interested:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parrot+skin+tone+emoji+&t=ffip&ia=web
Emojis evolved from the smileys we had in the late 90s, which were mostly yellow, but could be in various colours, like red for the angry face. Those smileys evolved from the text versions like these :) or :D
Also the first gen iPhone emoji were a Japanese add on pack, iirc a keyboard addition. I had to install this add on on my iphone3g while I lived in Japan. Those emoji had average Japanese skin which white people just assumed was white. Only after those optional emoji got popular did apple make it standard, android copied, then people got worried about range of skin tone seeing as the Unicode was a global standard.
Historically the original emojis were ascii so the symbol had the color of text on the electronic device where typed
:-)
¯(ツ)/¯
:(
And so on
Those were called emoticons back in the day.
Same same
emoji became a thing because the Japanese wanted pictures aka kanji style representation of the ascii expressions. In any regards OG skin tone was average Japanese
I’m pale and I use the pale emoji, feels more like me.
I never really used the yellow ones. 🤷🏼
I think the idea is that the default yellow is symbolic (with some “white people are the default” connotation) and now that you can choose the skin tone of your emojis, many people now select one that matches their skin tone.
Is it considered poor taste to use darker emoji colors if you are white?
Intentions matter in these questions. You’ll know it when you see it if it is in bad taste.
Like emoji blackface?
In one app I’m a girl with medium skin tone and dark hair. In another I’m a pale boy with red blond hair. No idea how either one was chosen.
Only if you are using them to convey some kind of racist message or pretending to be someone of color.
Without necessarily offering an opinion myself, there’s absolutely a chance someone views it as being in poor taste, thus at the least I would avoid doing it outside of conversations with those you know well.
I can give you a real answer, because I asked my wife this exact question (she’s black and uses the skin tone closest to hers, I’m white and also just use yellow ones). She said it’s so rare to get to choose a digital representation that matches her skin tone that she just thinks it’s fun to get to do it for once.
Does the skin tone modifier work on the peach emoji?
fuck legit laughed out loud at this
Which is the same reason they make characters of different races, genders and sexualities in video games.
And people complain about these things “being forced on them” obviously without realizing that all those minorities are typically not represented in media. It’s such a minor thing that should be easy to ignore if it doesn’t apply to you, but when it does apply, feels good to know that someone was thinking about representing someone like you.
She said it’s so rare to get to choose a digital representation that matches her skin tone that she just thinks it’s fun to get to do it for once.
awww, that sounds so cute
Emoji is a failed concept anyway, because what you send is not necessary what the recipient gets. Why the app developers don’t get this, is one of the great mysteries of our century.
But when I do use them, I choose the yellow ones.
I would agree that emoji have basically failed. They confuse communication rather than facilitate it.
Why are there 😀 and 😃 ? “Grinning face” and “Grinning face with big eyes.” Why? There are so many of them with subtle details like this that A. choosing between them is a bigger chore than it should be and B. they have to be rendered at such a high DPI that “bro just increase your font size” becomes the bullshit workaround everyone tells you to do. I can read the English text just fine, but on most screens emoji are indistinct blobs.
Emoji are subject to all the variation that fonts are. You know how there are two lowercase “g” glyphs? There’s the one you probably do when handwriting which is an O and a J, and then there’s the loop over a loop that basically no one hand writes, it looks like the font Lemmy uses has that g. Well, emoji are like that. Like how they had to add “male dancer/female dancer” the the standard because Google rendered the “dancer” emoji as a lame disco man, Apple rendered it as a woman in a red dress.
They don’t get used the way we used to use emoticons. I don’t see people say things like "I can’t go to the park today ☹️ " I see people say "Hey guys 👬 I just got back from the store 🏪 with some groceries 🥫 and took a picture 📸 of my dog 🐕 " Which to me demonstrates a failure to grow past the Sesame Street book with 6 thick rigid pages reading level.
Finally, there are so many symbols that have alternate meanings that you just have to know. Like you can send white or tan or brown faces, but all eggplants are purple and all peaches are pink.
And yet eggplant and peach are obvious enough.
All my emojis have jaundice
The yellow should be the only one. I find it absolutely idiotic that they needed to include all different skin colors. I think that’s similar to my native language (Finnish) not having gender specific pronouns (hän = he/she) and then someone wanting to come up with ones. That’s “fixing” a problem that didn’t even exist in the first place.
Maybe you’d feel differently if your country wasn’t 90+% homogeneous with a light skin tone
There are no yellow skinned people where I live
It’s still pretty light if we’re considering the array of skin tones that are throughout humanity. If you weren’t Finnish, but instead African or Indian or South American for example, maybe you wouldn’t feel that yellow was representative of you and your people. Saying yellow is fine for everyone because you feel it’s fine isn’t taking into account the other billions of opinions in the world.
I quess we need a billion more variations of those emojis then. Lets keep paying more attention to the skin color of people. That seems like a great idea.
Yeah you don’t get it and never will, that’s a shame
Ad hominem is not an argument to the contrary
No, but having a blindfold on doesn’t suddenly make it okay to punch someone
I really don’t care what colours of emojis exist. Use them or don’t use them, it’s not that deep.
Actually spending time thinking about coloured emojis is a little strange to me. If someone wants to use a black one, white one, or yellow one just let it be.
You sound like the kind of people that would have proclaimed it’s idiotic to give women rights, or let them vote, or give LGBTQ+ people rights of marriage or whatever. Change is inevitable and just because something has no bearing on your life doesn’t mean it has no bearing on anybodies life.
You sound like the kind of people that would have proclaimed it’s idiotic to give women rights, or let them vote, or give LGBTQ+ people rights of marriage or whatever.
You’re insane.
I feel this is like saying the Simpsons, and most of Springfield, aren’t supposed to be white because their skin is yellow.
It’s no surprise the default emoji color is so close to white skin, and it’s no surprise that some people feel a lack of representation by this.
But emoji’s are not derived from the Simpsons. They’re derived from the yellow smiley face ideogram that originated in the 1960s, it was designed by the artist Harvey Ball.
It’s yellow, not because it’s supposed to represent whiteness, but because the company colors of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company it was designed for were yellow and black, and because it feels sunny, bright and positive. It’s an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun, and does not represent a human with a specific skin color.
Why would someone want to add gendered pronouns to a language
