8 ms·

Why White People Don’t Use White Emoji

12 points by dustinmoris 8y ago

pjrule 8y ago
(2016)
esotericn 8y ago
I don't use white emoji because it's a weird irrelevance for a thumbs up, in the same way that a standard smiley emoji is genderless. I would have thought that would explain it for the most part.
mikestew 8y ago
Here’s my crazy crackpot theory, based partly on my own reasoning for not immediately changing from Simpsons Yellow to Midwestern White Boy: the defaults for life in general have always catered to whitey (never once did my sisters have to ask why there’s no white Barbie), and yellow is a close enough default that the white person doesn’t bother to look up how to change it. In the U. S., at least, we went a long time trying to pretend people of color didn’t exist, so when new options come, the person of color says, “hell, yeah!” I didn’t change it for a long time because it comes up in the middle of trying to fire off a quick text, do it later. Finally changed it because of some misfired mental need for consistency, not to “represent”.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  Another issue might be that some of them don't have the alternate colours (at least on iOS) - none of the emoji faces do and neither does "shaking hands" inexplicably - people may try to set the colour on a face, it doesn't work, they assume it just doesn't work for any of them, etc. Apparently these are the ones with alternates: https://emojipedia.org/emoji-modifier-fitzpatrick-type-1-2/ https://emojipedia.org/emoji-modifier-fitzpatrick-type-1-2/
- sridca 8y ago
  Reminds me of the color of band-aids (it never occurred to me for a long while, as a "person of colour", that band-aids are actually flesh-colored). https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rachelmariestone/2012/11/26/the-color-of-band-aids/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rachelmariestone/2012/11/26/th...
nickthegreek 8y ago
iPhone user here. Article seems to focus on just hand the hand face emoji and not the upper body emoji's. On the hand emoji's, I use the slight tanned white skin. For the upper body emoji, I normally use the white skinned/brown hair emoji as it reflects more than my than just skin tone. When it comes to Christmas, I only use black santa. The article seems to undermine the headline though. They found 19% used the lightest skintone, and 30% used the second lightest.... that's 49% of their sampled tweets.. They also didn't do any work to find the race of those sampled in the tweets.
- nieve 8y ago
  Exactly - the average for the darkest three tones is 17% and for the lightest two 24%, that's a huge bias in the opposite direction of the author's conclusion. I'm not sure if he deliberately mischaracterized the data for click-bait purposes or he's incompetent at arithmetic, but his data completely disproves his claims.
seniorsassycat 8y ago
The Unicode consortium was careful not to add race modifiers. There is no white skin and no black skin modifier, the modifiers are based on Fitzpatrick scale, described by tanning and burning. I'm white, but I have type 3 or 4 skin, I always tan but I might burn if I don't wear sunscreen on the first weeks of spring. Type three was the most used modifier in the articles data. In addition to Aditya Mukerjee's quote about the yellow emoji including white people, I think the 1-2 emoji is to light for most white people.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
Hint: disable JS when visiting theatlantic.com, the website becomes more usable then. (This applies to most other informative websites btw)
stunt 8y ago
Skin tone emojis are double-edged sword. Not sure if it was a good idea! Same thing is happening to gender now!
- krapp 8y ago
  People can use these features, or not, it's their choice. It's a positive for people who happen to want to use them, but what's the negative?
  - nickthegreek 8y ago
    Agreed, I don't believe those who now have emoji representation see this as a negative.
  - stunt 8y ago
    > It's a positive for people who happen to want to use them Yes, that's true. But, I saw similar articles and discussions many times! That simply means it did introduce some friction which looks very unnecessarily. I don't remember seeing any discussion against yellow emojis or feeling the necessity before skin tones. Nevertheless, having these discussions is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps all of it is the result of not talking about it.
mcphage 8y ago
I don't see why you need shame to explain the disparity. Some people felt that the default yellow still implied whiteness (like it does for the Simpsons), so they added skin tone modifiers. The fact that white people don't feel the need to change to explicit whiteness—but feel represented by the yellow—fully supports the reason that they were added in the first place. If white people did use them just as often, wouldn't that imply that the association between yellow skin and whiteness wasn't there? So all this article supports is that adding them turned out to be the right decision after all.
- btschaegg 8y ago
  > The fact that white people don't feel the need to change to explicit whiteness—but feel represented by the yellow Having no data at all (it would be interesting how you would even study this properly), but I still wanted to add this: It's not that the yellow emojis make me feel "represented" by being yellow. It's just that I don't care. If I want to express that I'm amused/angry/sad, it's the face that counts, so I see no point in fiddling with it just so it appears in some other shade of color. You could still wonder about the causes of this, of course. I'd guess that having the same skin tone as a big majority of people where I live, I never had to concern myself with any societal differences in the sense that I was affected by them. Also, it never got to be that big a part of my identity, since I'm "like everyone else" in that regard.
  - mcphage 8y ago
    > It's not that the yellow emojis make me feel "represented" by being yellow. It's just that I don't care. You look at the yellow, and you don't think "that's not me". So you don't mind using it. POCs looked at the yellow, and did think "that's not me". So color modifiers were added. The fact that the darker skin tone modifiers are being used more heavily than the lighter skin tone modifiers makes me think that adding them was the right decision.
koosnel 8y ago
I am White and I use White emojis with pride. If that upsets anyone they can just deal with it.
- krapp 8y ago
  No one cares.
  - koosnel 8y ago
    You care enough to reply.

12 points by dustinmoris 8y ago

(2016)

I don't use white emoji because it's a weird irrelevance for a thumbs up, in the same way that a standard smiley emoji is genderless. I would have thought that would explain it for the most part.

mikestew 8y ago

Here’s my crazy crackpot theory, based partly on my own reasoning for not immediately changing from Simpsons Yellow to Midwestern White Boy: the defaults for life in general have always catered to whitey (never once did my sisters have to ask why there’s no white Barbie), and yellow is a close enough default that the white person doesn’t bother to look up how to change it. In the U. S., at least, we went a long time trying to pretend people of color didn’t exist, so when new options come, the person of color says, “hell, yeah!” I didn’t change it for a long time because it comes up in the middle of trying to fire off a quick text, do it later. Finally changed it because of some misfired mental need for consistency, not to “represent”.

zimpenfish 8y ago
Another issue might be that some of them don't have the alternate colours (at least on iOS) - none of the emoji faces do and neither does "shaking hands" inexplicably - people may try to set the colour on a face, it doesn't work, they assume it just doesn't work for any of them, etc. Apparently these are the ones with alternates: https://emojipedia.org/emoji-modifier-fitzpatrick-type-1-2/ https://emojipedia.org/emoji-modifier-fitzpatrick-type-1-2/
sridca 8y ago
Reminds me of the color of band-aids (it never occurred to me for a long while, as a "person of colour", that band-aids are actually flesh-colored). https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rachelmariestone/2012/11/26/the-color-of-band-aids/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rachelmariestone/2012/11/26/th...

nickthegreek 8y ago

iPhone user here. Article seems to focus on just hand the hand face emoji and not the upper body emoji's. On the hand emoji's, I use the slight tanned white skin. For the upper body emoji, I normally use the white skinned/brown hair emoji as it reflects more than my than just skin tone. When it comes to Christmas, I only use black santa. The article seems to undermine the headline though. They found 19% used the lightest skintone, and 30% used the second lightest.... that's 49% of their sampled tweets.. They also didn't do any work to find the race of those sampled in the tweets.

nieve 8y ago
Exactly - the average for the darkest three tones is 17% and for the lightest two 24%, that's a huge bias in the opposite direction of the author's conclusion. I'm not sure if he deliberately mischaracterized the data for click-bait purposes or he's incompetent at arithmetic, but his data completely disproves his claims.

seniorsassycat 8y ago

The Unicode consortium was careful not to add race modifiers. There is no white skin and no black skin modifier, the modifiers are based on Fitzpatrick scale, described by tanning and burning. I'm white, but I have type 3 or 4 skin, I always tan but I might burn if I don't wear sunscreen on the first weeks of spring. Type three was the most used modifier in the articles data. In addition to Aditya Mukerjee's quote about the yellow emoji including white people, I think the 1-2 emoji is to light for most white people.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

Hint: disable JS when visiting theatlantic.com, the website becomes more usable then. (This applies to most other informative websites btw)

stunt 8y ago

Skin tone emojis are double-edged sword. Not sure if it was a good idea! Same thing is happening to gender now!

krapp 8y ago
People can use these features, or not, it's their choice. It's a positive for people who happen to want to use them, but what's the negative?
- nickthegreek 8y ago
  Agreed, I don't believe those who now have emoji representation see this as a negative.
- stunt 8y ago
  > It's a positive for people who happen to want to use them Yes, that's true. But, I saw similar articles and discussions many times! That simply means it did introduce some friction which looks very unnecessarily. I don't remember seeing any discussion against yellow emojis or feeling the necessity before skin tones. Nevertheless, having these discussions is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps all of it is the result of not talking about it.

mcphage 8y ago

I don't see why you need shame to explain the disparity. Some people felt that the default yellow still implied whiteness (like it does for the Simpsons), so they added skin tone modifiers. The fact that white people don't feel the need to change to explicit whiteness—but feel represented by the yellow—fully supports the reason that they were added in the first place. If white people did use them just as often, wouldn't that imply that the association between yellow skin and whiteness wasn't there? So all this article supports is that adding them turned out to be the right decision after all.

btschaegg 8y ago
> The fact that white people don't feel the need to change to explicit whiteness—but feel represented by the yellow Having no data at all (it would be interesting how you would even study this properly), but I still wanted to add this: It's not that the yellow emojis make me feel "represented" by being yellow. It's just that I don't care. If I want to express that I'm amused/angry/sad, it's the face that counts, so I see no point in fiddling with it just so it appears in some other shade of color. You could still wonder about the causes of this, of course. I'd guess that having the same skin tone as a big majority of people where I live, I never had to concern myself with any societal differences in the sense that I was affected by them. Also, it never got to be that big a part of my identity, since I'm "like everyone else" in that regard.
- mcphage 8y ago
  > It's not that the yellow emojis make me feel "represented" by being yellow. It's just that I don't care. You look at the yellow, and you don't think "that's not me". So you don't mind using it. POCs looked at the yellow, and did think "that's not me". So color modifiers were added. The fact that the darker skin tone modifiers are being used more heavily than the lighter skin tone modifiers makes me think that adding them was the right decision.

koosnel 8y ago

I am White and I use White emojis with pride. If that upsets anyone they can just deal with it.

krapp 8y ago
No one cares.
- koosnel 8y ago
  You care enough to reply.