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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 t

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.

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.