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the one that gets me is adding race to emoji. they all used to be 'Simpsons yellow', a skin tone not found in any ethnic or racial group, and as such not repres

the one that gets me is adding race to emoji. they all used to be 'Simpsons yellow', a skin tone not found in any ethnic or racial group, and as such not representing or excluding any group but now we have black white and other various skin tones for our happy-faces. WHY? Does black happy face mean something different than white happy face isn't happiness universal? why bring race into something that was simply meant to express emotion?

krapp 5y ago
I don't understand why so many people get so angry about something so inconsequential.
- dimgl 5y ago
  No one is angry. That's the point. The point is that no one should care about race, but everyone all of the sudden is.
  - krapp 5y ago
    But we're talking about expanding the color palette on a set of icons. If no one is angry about it, why do people keep complaining about it? >The point is that no one should care about race, but everyone all of the sudden is. This doesn't read like the opinion of someone who isn't angry about something.
    - smegger001 5y ago
      Not angry, exhausted. Tired of everything becoming new theater in the culture war. Tired of things that were intrinsically neutral and apolitical before are being changed for no reason other than to make it another battleground.
      - open0 5y ago
        Maybe things were neutral for you, but not for others? Man I wish I could see a face attached to every comment in this thread.
        smegger001 5y ago
        perhaps its better that no one can see the skin tone of any of commenters because then comments have to be judge on the merits of their arguments rather than melanin concentration in the skin of the people saying them.
        open0 5y ago
        Or maybe it's just an endless sea of 35-50 year old white dudes that throw a hissy fit whenever someone else is considered instead of just them. Here's the point -- you're a fucking dipshit if you think "wokeness" is even in the top 100 problems that this country is facing.
        pseudalopex 5y ago
        People can judge the merit of arguments and form hypotheses about their authors.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      I think what people are getting at with this (and trying to be cordial about it as best they can) is that the only people that want to have a separate image for every color person on the planet are racists.
      - krapp 5y ago
        How are they racist? What races are they discriminating against? What racial stereotypes are they expressing?
        betwixthewires 5y ago
        I've been told the last several years that you don't have to discriminate to be racist. I think the idea that you feel somehow wrong using images to express yourself that are the color of a different race is just a little racist.
  - jmull 5y ago
    The post that was being replied to sounds worked up about it to me. "the one that gets me...", "WHY?"
    - account42 5y ago
      Reads more like confusion rather than anger to me.
eloff 5y ago
Fully agree. It seems so stupid. Why do people care about what color the emoji is? Don't they have real problems?
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  The reason is because "woke" is racism in reverse. As long as there's racism (in any direction), color matters. You can't treat or think of people differently on the basis of race without knowing who is in what race. The last thing "woke" people want is for discrimination on the basis of race to disappear, or for the color of people's skin to no longer factor in to how they are judged or treated. Edit: agreed with a below commenter, and thanks for the correction. There isn't any such thing as "racism in reverse", just racism.
  - casefields 5y ago
    Here's Christopher Hitchens in his 2001 book, Letters to a Young Contrarian: >Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political". It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities". This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.
wernercd 5y ago
> why bring race into something Because making everything about race is how we fight racism... somehow...
justbored123 5y ago
Step back, take a deep breath and read what you wrote. You are saying that we should not care, but you clearly care if the face is black ... So, somebody decided that he would like to have a black emoji because he like it that and you decided to make an issue out of it ... and accuse the other person of what you yourself are doing ... If you don't see it is because you don't want to see it. "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
- ipaddr 5y ago
  He is saying that by changing it from neutral to personalized skin tones we have made things more personal and lost something special. Polarized.
- smegger001 5y ago
  I am not upset that there is black, i am bothered that something that was implicitly neutral is not neutral anymore. that it can now be used as yet another point in which to divide than unify.
  - JamisonM 5y ago
    If you've watched the Simpsons, the "Simpsons Yellow" is white, it is clearly demonstrated in the show - Apu isn't yellow! It undermines your whole point!
    - smegger001 5y ago
      fine make them cyan then and my point would still stand
      - JamisonM 5y ago
        But your point doesn't stand because they aren't cyan!
        5y ago
mattnewton 5y ago
I don’t think everyone interpreted “Simpsons yellow” as race-less. Certainly the show didn’t - On the show, Homer identifies as a white male IIRC, and some characters (like Apu) are not yellow. You have to pick some skin tone for the default; just floating features would be off putting. Believing that the pan-white default of “simpsons yellow” is raceless because you feel represented in it excludes that others might not feel represented in it. And it’s a small thing to have fixed that costs you basically nothing.
- smegger001 5y ago
  Somewhere farther down another commenter asked if I would consider it race neutral if it was dark magenta. My response was yeah sure. If it is not a real skin tone it is neutral and i would feel just as attached to it and feel it is raceless equally as bright yellow. I don't feel anymore or less represented either. *edited for spelling
  - mattnewton 5y ago
    Dark magenta would probably have the same problem that floating features have, which is it distracts from the content (and would probably be hard to read compared to actual skin tones). The situation was, people chose yellow as the default, and that excluded some people. So, if we cared about being polite and fixing it for those people, and if our options were to either change to some hideous magenta that couldn’t be misinterpreted as representing a real skin tone vs just offering more skin tones, I think we made the right choice.
    - jxding 5y ago
      The choice is not dark magenta or bright yellow or bust though. A large spectrum of colors exist, and if we really wanted to not offend anyone, we could have chosen blue or green or pink or orange or any other color that couldn't possibly be a skin color (untill we meet easily-offended aliens of course).
    - HKH2 5y ago
      Usually a generic happy face is yellow. I don't think it has anything at all to do with race. It makes sense that that's why they made the other emoticons yellow.
nsilvestri 5y ago
"Simpsons yellow" actually represents white people on the actual Simpsons TV show. The other characters who represent the non-white population all have different skin colors that line up with the people of those cultures or races. So even though nobody's actual skin color is Simpons yellow, culturally we already were representing white skin as that color.
- smegger001 5y ago
  True, I must confess to only having watched one whole episode of the Simpsons start to finish, as the humor never seemed to click for me. I always much preferred Futurama.
furyofantares 5y ago
I perceive the cartoon yellow emojis to be white, an alternative interpretation never occurred to me at all. The first time a black coworker gave a black thumbs-up reaction on slack, I noticed I didn't want to +1 it. I didn't identify with it, it didn't feel like it was coming from me. This was a strong reaction and totally unexpected, and it was a "holy shit" moment as well, because I suddenly imagined how excluded I would have felt if that had been the only option for years.
- nostromo 5y ago
  Emojis weren't even created by white people, and were a cartoon yellow in some of the first Japanese sets. Here's SoftBank's 2006 emoji set (well before any western companies got involved): https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2006/ https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2006/
  - furyofantares 5y ago
    I may have misunderstood you, but those SoftBank emojis at least don't look cartoon yellow at all.
- throway98752343 5y ago
  I've found myself using the gender neutral reactions instead of the gendered versions despite not identifying with them as much just so my colleagues don't have to choose between incrementing an emoji that doesn't represent them and highlighting that they're different by adding their own gendered reaction. But it'd be nice to not have to think about it the first place.
- hervature 5y ago
  There’s a lot wrapped into this comment. Did you perceive yellow to be white because it is the default and you are white? I say that because of your realization you had. I assume that some people felt excluded because of their preconceived notion that the Simpsons are white (with good reason) but also that others (perhaps younger people who may not have seen the show) would follow the same default->my skin color connection.
- 5y ago
solidasparagus 5y ago
When using emojis to convey their emotions, some people prefer their emojis to match what they look like. It's not a big deal - certainly not worth complaining about a feature that makes some people happier. The impact of online avatars on self-perception and outcomes is an interesting topic that's worth looking into (it's not limited to race). But more importantly, why shouldn't a black person be able to use a black emoji? We have the technology.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I agree completely - why not let folks have emojis that more accurately reflect them? That said, I agree with the GP, who the hell says "I don't approve of unnecessarily gendered emoji"? I mean, fine, then don't use them. Or other commenters that felt uncomfortable plus-oneing emojis that didn't match their skin tone. Really?? I upvote these things all the time without a second thought because it just means I agree with you, not that we're the same shade. I think it's kind of sad when literally every mundane action, even something as trivial as upvoting someone's comment, can only be seen through the prism of race first and foremost.
whoooooo123 5y ago
Am I misremembering? I coulda sworn that originally the 'white' (realistic, non-yellow) emojis were the only option, and the "neutral" yellow tone was added at the same time as the more diverse set of realistic skin tones. I'm certain that's how it was in Slack, for example - I remember discussing it with people at the time. Was I hallucinating?
- account42 5y ago
  I think if you are using Slack as an example of how emojis or emoticons were rendered "originally" then you are off by at least a decade. Maybe there were some platfroms/applications that used caucasian skin tones in their emojis, but that was definitely not the rule.
throwaway316943 5y ago
The original smiley face was yellow because it was drawn on yellow paper, chosen because the task was to make a logo to cheer people up and yellow was “sunshiny and bright”. The colour has nothing to do with skin tone.
MillenialMan 5y ago
I have a fun conspiracy theory that the variety of emojis is a subtle plot to increase the barrier to entry against smaller companies. Now they have to invest in a much larger number of graphics to create unique set, which encourages them to use something off-the-shelf and brandless.

krapp 5y ago

I don't understand why so many people get so angry about something so inconsequential.

dimgl 5y ago
No one is angry. That's the point. The point is that no one should care about race, but everyone all of the sudden is.
- krapp 5y ago
  But we're talking about expanding the color palette on a set of icons. If no one is angry about it, why do people keep complaining about it? >The point is that no one should care about race, but everyone all of the sudden is. This doesn't read like the opinion of someone who isn't angry about something.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    Not angry, exhausted. Tired of everything becoming new theater in the culture war. Tired of things that were intrinsically neutral and apolitical before are being changed for no reason other than to make it another battleground.
    - open0 5y ago
      Maybe things were neutral for you, but not for others? Man I wish I could see a face attached to every comment in this thread.
      - smegger001 5y ago
        perhaps its better that no one can see the skin tone of any of commenters because then comments have to be judge on the merits of their arguments rather than melanin concentration in the skin of the people saying them.
        open0 5y ago
        Or maybe it's just an endless sea of 35-50 year old white dudes that throw a hissy fit whenever someone else is considered instead of just them. Here's the point -- you're a fucking dipshit if you think "wokeness" is even in the top 100 problems that this country is facing.
        pseudalopex 5y ago
        People can judge the merit of arguments and form hypotheses about their authors.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I think what people are getting at with this (and trying to be cordial about it as best they can) is that the only people that want to have a separate image for every color person on the planet are racists.
    - krapp 5y ago
      How are they racist? What races are they discriminating against? What racial stereotypes are they expressing?
      - betwixthewires 5y ago
        I've been told the last several years that you don't have to discriminate to be racist. I think the idea that you feel somehow wrong using images to express yourself that are the color of a different race is just a little racist.
- jmull 5y ago
  The post that was being replied to sounds worked up about it to me. "the one that gets me...", "WHY?"
  - account42 5y ago
    Reads more like confusion rather than anger to me.

eloff 5y ago

Fully agree. It seems so stupid. Why do people care about what color the emoji is? Don't they have real problems?

TimTheTinker 5y ago
The reason is because "woke" is racism in reverse. As long as there's racism (in any direction), color matters. You can't treat or think of people differently on the basis of race without knowing who is in what race. The last thing "woke" people want is for discrimination on the basis of race to disappear, or for the color of people's skin to no longer factor in to how they are judged or treated. Edit: agreed with a below commenter, and thanks for the correction. There isn't any such thing as "racism in reverse", just racism.
- casefields 5y ago
  Here's Christopher Hitchens in his 2001 book, Letters to a Young Contrarian: >Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political". It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities". This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.

wernercd 5y ago

> why bring race into something Because making everything about race is how we fight racism... somehow...

justbored123 5y ago

Step back, take a deep breath and read what you wrote. You are saying that we should not care, but you clearly care if the face is black ... So, somebody decided that he would like to have a black emoji because he like it that and you decided to make an issue out of it ... and accuse the other person of what you yourself are doing ... If you don't see it is because you don't want to see it. "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"

ipaddr 5y ago
He is saying that by changing it from neutral to personalized skin tones we have made things more personal and lost something special. Polarized.
smegger001 5y ago
I am not upset that there is black, i am bothered that something that was implicitly neutral is not neutral anymore. that it can now be used as yet another point in which to divide than unify.
- JamisonM 5y ago
  If you've watched the Simpsons, the "Simpsons Yellow" is white, it is clearly demonstrated in the show - Apu isn't yellow! It undermines your whole point!
  - smegger001 5y ago
    fine make them cyan then and my point would still stand
    - JamisonM 5y ago
      But your point doesn't stand because they aren't cyan!
      - 5y ago

mattnewton 5y ago

I don’t think everyone interpreted “Simpsons yellow” as race-less. Certainly the show didn’t - On the show, Homer identifies as a white male IIRC, and some characters (like Apu) are not yellow. You have to pick some skin tone for the default; just floating features would be off putting. Believing that the pan-white default of “simpsons yellow” is raceless because you feel represented in it excludes that others might not feel represented in it. And it’s a small thing to have fixed that costs you basically nothing.

smegger001 5y ago
Somewhere farther down another commenter asked if I would consider it race neutral if it was dark magenta. My response was yeah sure. If it is not a real skin tone it is neutral and i would feel just as attached to it and feel it is raceless equally as bright yellow. I don't feel anymore or less represented either. *edited for spelling
- mattnewton 5y ago
  Dark magenta would probably have the same problem that floating features have, which is it distracts from the content (and would probably be hard to read compared to actual skin tones). The situation was, people chose yellow as the default, and that excluded some people. So, if we cared about being polite and fixing it for those people, and if our options were to either change to some hideous magenta that couldn’t be misinterpreted as representing a real skin tone vs just offering more skin tones, I think we made the right choice.
  - jxding 5y ago
    The choice is not dark magenta or bright yellow or bust though. A large spectrum of colors exist, and if we really wanted to not offend anyone, we could have chosen blue or green or pink or orange or any other color that couldn't possibly be a skin color (untill we meet easily-offended aliens of course).
  - HKH2 5y ago
    Usually a generic happy face is yellow. I don't think it has anything at all to do with race. It makes sense that that's why they made the other emoticons yellow.

nsilvestri 5y ago

"Simpsons yellow" actually represents white people on the actual Simpsons TV show. The other characters who represent the non-white population all have different skin colors that line up with the people of those cultures or races. So even though nobody's actual skin color is Simpons yellow, culturally we already were representing white skin as that color.

smegger001 5y ago
True, I must confess to only having watched one whole episode of the Simpsons start to finish, as the humor never seemed to click for me. I always much preferred Futurama.

furyofantares 5y ago

I perceive the cartoon yellow emojis to be white, an alternative interpretation never occurred to me at all. The first time a black coworker gave a black thumbs-up reaction on slack, I noticed I didn't want to +1 it. I didn't identify with it, it didn't feel like it was coming from me. This was a strong reaction and totally unexpected, and it was a "holy shit" moment as well, because I suddenly imagined how excluded I would have felt if that had been the only option for years.

nostromo 5y ago
Emojis weren't even created by white people, and were a cartoon yellow in some of the first Japanese sets. Here's SoftBank's 2006 emoji set (well before any western companies got involved): https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2006/ https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2006/
- furyofantares 5y ago
  I may have misunderstood you, but those SoftBank emojis at least don't look cartoon yellow at all.
throway98752343 5y ago
I've found myself using the gender neutral reactions instead of the gendered versions despite not identifying with them as much just so my colleagues don't have to choose between incrementing an emoji that doesn't represent them and highlighting that they're different by adding their own gendered reaction. But it'd be nice to not have to think about it the first place.
hervature 5y ago
There’s a lot wrapped into this comment. Did you perceive yellow to be white because it is the default and you are white? I say that because of your realization you had. I assume that some people felt excluded because of their preconceived notion that the Simpsons are white (with good reason) but also that others (perhaps younger people who may not have seen the show) would follow the same default->my skin color connection.
5y ago

solidasparagus 5y ago

When using emojis to convey their emotions, some people prefer their emojis to match what they look like. It's not a big deal - certainly not worth complaining about a feature that makes some people happier. The impact of online avatars on self-perception and outcomes is an interesting topic that's worth looking into (it's not limited to race). But more importantly, why shouldn't a black person be able to use a black emoji? We have the technology.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I agree completely - why not let folks have emojis that more accurately reflect them? That said, I agree with the GP, who the hell says "I don't approve of unnecessarily gendered emoji"? I mean, fine, then don't use them. Or other commenters that felt uncomfortable plus-oneing emojis that didn't match their skin tone. Really?? I upvote these things all the time without a second thought because it just means I agree with you, not that we're the same shade. I think it's kind of sad when literally every mundane action, even something as trivial as upvoting someone's comment, can only be seen through the prism of race first and foremost.

whoooooo123 5y ago

Am I misremembering? I coulda sworn that originally the 'white' (realistic, non-yellow) emojis were the only option, and the "neutral" yellow tone was added at the same time as the more diverse set of realistic skin tones. I'm certain that's how it was in Slack, for example - I remember discussing it with people at the time. Was I hallucinating?

account42 5y ago
I think if you are using Slack as an example of how emojis or emoticons were rendered "originally" then you are off by at least a decade. Maybe there were some platfroms/applications that used caucasian skin tones in their emojis, but that was definitely not the rule.

throwaway316943 5y ago

The original smiley face was yellow because it was drawn on yellow paper, chosen because the task was to make a logo to cheer people up and yellow was “sunshiny and bright”. The colour has nothing to do with skin tone.

MillenialMan 5y ago

I have a fun conspiracy theory that the variety of emojis is a subtle plot to increase the barrier to entry against smaller companies. Now they have to invest in a much larger number of graphics to create unique set, which encourages them to use something off-the-shelf and brandless.