Is there any significance to people using emojis that match their skin tone?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ποΈ 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 π.
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.
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 (hΓ€n = 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.
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.
interestingly, according to one study im half-remembering, people from countries with an ethnic majority see the Simpsons as part of their ethnicity. ie Asian people perceive The Simpsons as Asian.
I really donβt care what colours of emojis exist. Use them or donβt use them, itβs 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 itβs 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 doesnβt mean it has no bearing on anybodies life.
You sound like the kind of people that would have proclaimed itβs idiotic to give women rights, or let them vote, or give LGBTQ+ people rights of marriage or whatever.
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."
My immediate opinion upon skin tone emoji being introduced was the mildest frustration: weβd 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 companyβs 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, Iβve 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 theyβre like βyeah whatβs with that?!β Self image or eyesight related perhapsβ¦
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 π«₯. Also the hole emoji is awesome π³οΈ
And that was a way longer ramble then I intended π
And finally, good by ποΈππ»ππΌππ½ππΎππΏ
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? π€·π€·π»π€·πΌπ€·π½π€·πΎπ€·πΏπ€·ββοΈπ€·π»ββοΈπ€·πΌββοΈπ€·π½ββοΈπ€·πΎββοΈπ€·πΏββοΈπ€·ββοΈπ€·π»ββοΈπ€·πΌββοΈπ€·π½ββοΈπ€·πΎββοΈπ€·πΏββοΈ
Isnβt it weird that only the white people in The Simpsons are yellow? Thereβs other races that arenβt yellow. And the Simpsonβs world mirrors the real word; a large number of yellow people migrated from Eastern Europe to settle in Springfield.
I guess itβs better than the Doug universe, with people being either Caucasian or blue or purple. Very weird choice of representation, Nickelodeon! π
Matt Groening said he made the characters in the Simpsons yellow with oddly colored hair so that people would be confused by the colors and try to adjust the knobs on their TVs to fix it only to never get it quite right.
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.
Then what is your explanation for black and brown people more likely to use the skin toned emojis, as has been mentioned so much in this thread? Are they less lazy than white people, or care more about it? If they care more about it, then why?
White dude here. I use the white skin emojis, but honestly I think it's just because I see my black and brown friends use their skin tones as a rule, and I feel like using the yellow tone is a bit weird when others are using the skin tone customization.
I'm not ashamed of my skin color or anything and the phone remembers my last tone selection so I don't really see a reason to not use it.
I just use the white as fuck guy because he has a green shirt (at least, on Android anyway) and I like green. Me being white as fuck is just a coincidence. π€·π»ββοΈ
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 thatβs 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 youβre interested:
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.
Thank you, I had no idea the first phone emoji characters were a third party add-on. That explains how they got there, since Apple is pretty notorious for not including people shaped things in their art.
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.
I would agree that emoji have basically failed. They confuse communication rather than facilitate it.
Why are there π and π ? "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 βΉοΈ " I see people say "Hey guys π¬ I just got back from the store πͺ with some groceries π₯« and took a picture πΈ of my dog π " 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.
I have a white friend that uses the dark brown emojis, which I'm kind of uncomfortable with. I think he thinks he's showing solidarity. To me it seems like blackfishing. I haven't put any more thought into it though, as it is a pretty minor thing in a world with much more important things to be concerned with.
I dunno, I mean they do it with LEGO men now, but Simpsons or LEGO yellow skin only belongs on people so jaundiced that it's a miracle they're not dead. Same with the more feminine Lego women. What ever happened to that same stupid smile and just switch the hair piece? I mean if it makes you happy I guess, it ain't hurting nobody. I feel neither represented nor unrepresented by a cartoon yellow face. Maybe it's just because I'm white, I dunno. You do you I guess.
Itβs about personal preference for sure. I tried to start using the βwhiteβ emojis and it just didnβt seem to matter. If I do use an emoji, I tend to default to the Simpsons yellow because it requires no extra effort. I donβt see a ton of people using the skin-tone emojis at all. I also have no issue with people using them much like pronouns in emails/profiles.
Iβm also on iPhone so if I am going to extra mile Iβll just use my little sticker guy who better represents me in general.
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.
Without necessarily offering an opinion myself, thereβs 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.
Other responses are kind of fence-sitting so I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say yeah it's poor taste, but forgiveable. I think it just boils down to why would you use a skin tone that's not yours? Some people like having an emoji that's they share with others of their color, so why intrude on that?
I don't use emoji very much. The most I use is when I'm working and sometime asks me to take on a task in Slack. There is a thumbs up all emoji that is just the skin tone shifting to all the colors. I like it because then I don't have to give a fuck about it.
I was feeling a bit uncomfortable with asking about this topic because I was worried that I would inadvertently be offensive somehow, so I typed my actual verbal stim into the post. Making weird noises when I'm overwhelmed is a way for me to get the energy out sometimes.
This came up in an anti-racism group I belonged to many years ago, where I learned to try to be aware of my acceptance of whiteness as "default" or somehow raceless. I also learned not to jump in and center myself in conversations about how race is (or worse, should be) perceived by those negatively affected or sensitive to itβor at least I thought I learned that, but here I am about to press send.
I came away from that conversation with an understanding that while I may feel that my race is immaterial to my identity and my point of view, it is nonetheless a real component of the context of my attitudes and online presence, so it's valuable to ask if there's a reason I'd want to hide it.
Most white people expect peach color/white to be the universally accepted default and everyone should just not think about it because they themselves rarely have to think about representation.
White people in majority white countries rarely experience lack of representation so they don't think its a big deal.
If medium brown was the default lots of people would be losing their minds with rage and y'all know it.
White/peach is the universally accepted default for drawn or animated people in general, not emojis. Simpsons yellow is what they use for white people. It's still using white person color for the default.
I am caucasian, get sun burnt easilyβ¦ I left the emojis (faces) its Simpson color (are there other?) but handsβ¦ I cannot stand the cirrhotic yellow hands/arms, and need to switch their color at first occasionβ¦ I also tend to select black hair people though I am slightly brownβ¦ and many caucasian friends of mine use black handsβ¦ so I would say that in my environment your hypothesis is rather a background underfluctuation than a potential valid oneβ¦