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Skin color emojis are the weirdest thing. I always find it slightly odd if someone changed them from the default yellow. Why would one care?

by vasco 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
realusername 3y ago
I also don't get it, it should be a system wide setting and not something the sender specifies, I don't see any point in having some additional info not representing the meaning.
- kemayo 3y ago
  There is meaning, though -- it's specifically saying something about the person sending it and how they chose to present themselves.
  - realusername 3y ago
    I don't think there's any value to that though, emojis were more neutral before they added a color skin to it. Instead of reading "I'm happy", now you have a combination of "I'm happy but also white" or "I'm happy but also black", I don't think that belongs here and I don't see any point to that. If you don't like how they appear, some system setting could be made for changing the overall colours to switch them all to black, white, green or any other colour.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Why in heaven's name should it be a system wide setting? What sense would that make?
  - realusername 3y ago
    The whole feature doesn't make any sense in my opinion anyways. But if people are really sensitive to how emoji appears (a big if in my opinion since emojis are trivial but let's go with it), they could change them in the settings.
xbpx 3y ago
Maybe because your entire lived experience has been reordered based on your skin color and how it isn't a light yellow color. Powerful cultural strands exist in your community to push back against constraints placed upon you because of your skin color. Maybe seeing the only option for skin color in tech be much more representative of white skin color only serves to further remove your lived reality from public debate and understanding. Highlighted beyond irony by comments like this.
- jononomo 3y ago
  Why do you think a yellow emoji represents a white skin color?
  - kemayo 3y ago
    Have you watched the Simpsons? There's some powerful cultural baggage here. Anyway, it certainly implies not-dark skin...
    - jononomo 3y ago
      You may as well say it implies not-white skin as well. The only thing it implies in regard to skin color is bright yellow.
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        Then why is Apu brown?
        jononomo 3y ago
        Why are tomatoes red?
- Findecanor 3y ago
  Nobody has a light yellow colour. It was chosen so as to not to refer to any ethnicity in particular. BTW. If your skin actually has turned yellow then you should seek the nearest hospital emergency room ASAP, because it can be a sign of acute liver failure.
kemayo 3y ago
Speaking as a person with light-colored skin, the default-yellow emoji still basically look like me. Or, a version of me that's on the Simpsons, at least. I imagine that if I had dark skin, I'd feel a bit alienated by this experience. I'd be using these symbols that were supposed to represent me / my-reactions, but which very much didn't look like me. There'd be this pervasive sense that I was not included, not important enough to be the one represented. That would kinda suck. I don't have to experience that, and I'm happy to have emoji set up so that people who don't look like me also don't have to experience it. Put another way, would you care if the default emoji color was changed to be dark-skinned?
- asddubs 3y ago
  maybe the old forums had it right, and we should have gone with green or blue
- xdennis 3y ago
  > I imagine that if I had dark skin, I'd feel a bit alienated by this experience. And the change is literally skin deep. They added skin color, but not racial features. The "black man" emoji just looks like a white guy with dark skin. Imagine if I was a dwarf. I'd feel a bit alienated that all emojis are of tall people. Shouldn't there be a dwarf modifier for every emoji: dwarf man facepalming, dwarf woman shrugging, dwarf man bride, &c If you felt yellow is too white, they should have changed emojis to magenta or something. Adding variants makes them unusable.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Let's make them all dark brown then. I'm sure you wouldn't object.
    - xdennis 3y ago
      Seems fair. All the initial homo sapiens had black skin, so I guess it would be more representative.
- realusername 3y ago
jrmg 3y ago
I am white. I kept mine yellow for a long time. Then I noticed that most of the non-white people I knew were changing them - and actively celebrating when new skin-color variants were added. I realized that by keeping mine white I was not being ‘color-blind’, I was, at least to some, saying something like ‘I’m happy with the default because I think it adequately represents me’. Perhaps I did feel that, to be honest! On top of that, I could even be seen as passive-aggressively saying ‘your choice to use the skin colored emoji is unimportant and/or wrong’, which is certainly not what I felt at all! The whole Simpsons argument (emojis weren’t created in a vacuum - the Simpsons came first and there the ‘default’ yellow is obviously representing ‘white’) was in my mind a little when considering all this. I use the second-lightest white ones now.
- slily 3y ago
  In other words you succumbed to peer pressure from a crowd that is obsessed with identity labels. I see people of all shades use tones. To me it just says "btw I'm <race>". I can't help but think "who cares" in the back of my mind. I don't think yellow icons "represent me" either, I'm not self-inserting into The Simpsons. At the risk of being overly dramatic for a discussion about emoji, I think that dismissing the concept of "color-blindness" in favor of "race consciousness" and other assorted identity politics, which led to hyper-focus on superficial characteristics like skin color, has done more to foster racism than anything else in the last few decades.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    The Simpsons features non-yellow characters. Yellow characters are white. Lego actually is a stronger precedent for ‘yellow is what color you make a person when you don’t mean to identify race’. Once they started adding movie character minifigs they introduced white skin as well. But the journey there also gives the lie to ‘yellow minifigs we’re never coded white’. The very first Star Wars Lego sets shipped with yellow minifigs for characters like Luke, Leia and Han. It was only once they started to think about shipping characters like Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu that they realized ‘wait a minute, we’re never going to get away with a yellow Lando’. (And actually around the same time they were also dealing with releasing NBA player minifigs.. the decisionmaking at Lego must have been pretty complicated at the time)

Skin color emojis are the weirdest thing. I always find it slightly odd if someone changed them from the default yellow. Why would one care?

by vasco 3y ago

Skin color emojis are the weirdest thing. I always find it slightly odd if someone changed them from the default yellow. Why would one care?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

realusername 3y ago

I also don't get it, it should be a system wide setting and not something the sender specifies, I don't see any point in having some additional info not representing the meaning.

kemayo 3y ago
There is meaning, though -- it's specifically saying something about the person sending it and how they chose to present themselves.
- realusername 3y ago
  I don't think there's any value to that though, emojis were more neutral before they added a color skin to it. Instead of reading "I'm happy", now you have a combination of "I'm happy but also white" or "I'm happy but also black", I don't think that belongs here and I don't see any point to that. If you don't like how they appear, some system setting could be made for changing the overall colours to switch them all to black, white, green or any other colour.
Sharlin 3y ago
Why in heaven's name should it be a system wide setting? What sense would that make?
- realusername 3y ago
  The whole feature doesn't make any sense in my opinion anyways. But if people are really sensitive to how emoji appears (a big if in my opinion since emojis are trivial but let's go with it), they could change them in the settings.

xbpx 3y ago

Maybe because your entire lived experience has been reordered based on your skin color and how it isn't a light yellow color. Powerful cultural strands exist in your community to push back against constraints placed upon you because of your skin color. Maybe seeing the only option for skin color in tech be much more representative of white skin color only serves to further remove your lived reality from public debate and understanding. Highlighted beyond irony by comments like this.

jononomo 3y ago
Why do you think a yellow emoji represents a white skin color?
- kemayo 3y ago
  Have you watched the Simpsons? There's some powerful cultural baggage here. Anyway, it certainly implies not-dark skin...
  - jononomo 3y ago
    You may as well say it implies not-white skin as well. The only thing it implies in regard to skin color is bright yellow.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Then why is Apu brown?
      - jononomo 3y ago
        Why are tomatoes red?
Findecanor 3y ago
Nobody has a light yellow colour. It was chosen so as to not to refer to any ethnicity in particular. BTW. If your skin actually has turned yellow then you should seek the nearest hospital emergency room ASAP, because it can be a sign of acute liver failure.

kemayo 3y ago

Speaking as a person with light-colored skin, the default-yellow emoji still basically look like me. Or, a version of me that's on the Simpsons, at least. I imagine that if I had dark skin, I'd feel a bit alienated by this experience. I'd be using these symbols that were supposed to represent me / my-reactions, but which very much didn't look like me. There'd be this pervasive sense that I was not included, not important enough to be the one represented. That would kinda suck. I don't have to experience that, and I'm happy to have emoji set up so that people who don't look like me also don't have to experience it. Put another way, would you care if the default emoji color was changed to be dark-skinned?

asddubs 3y ago
maybe the old forums had it right, and we should have gone with green or blue
xdennis 3y ago
> I imagine that if I had dark skin, I'd feel a bit alienated by this experience. And the change is literally skin deep. They added skin color, but not racial features. The "black man" emoji just looks like a white guy with dark skin. Imagine if I was a dwarf. I'd feel a bit alienated that all emojis are of tall people. Shouldn't there be a dwarf modifier for every emoji: dwarf man facepalming, dwarf woman shrugging, dwarf man bride, &c If you felt yellow is too white, they should have changed emojis to magenta or something. Adding variants makes them unusable.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Let's make them all dark brown then. I'm sure you wouldn't object.
  - xdennis 3y ago
    Seems fair. All the initial homo sapiens had black skin, so I guess it would be more representative.
realusername 3y ago

jrmg 3y ago

I am white. I kept mine yellow for a long time. Then I noticed that most of the non-white people I knew were changing them - and actively celebrating when new skin-color variants were added. I realized that by keeping mine white I was not being ‘color-blind’, I was, at least to some, saying something like ‘I’m happy with the default because I think it adequately represents me’. Perhaps I did feel that, to be honest! On top of that, I could even be seen as passive-aggressively saying ‘your choice to use the skin colored emoji is unimportant and/or wrong’, which is certainly not what I felt at all! The whole Simpsons argument (emojis weren’t created in a vacuum - the Simpsons came first and there the ‘default’ yellow is obviously representing ‘white’) was in my mind a little when considering all this. I use the second-lightest white ones now.

slily 3y ago
In other words you succumbed to peer pressure from a crowd that is obsessed with identity labels. I see people of all shades use tones. To me it just says "btw I'm <race>". I can't help but think "who cares" in the back of my mind. I don't think yellow icons "represent me" either, I'm not self-inserting into The Simpsons. At the risk of being overly dramatic for a discussion about emoji, I think that dismissing the concept of "color-blindness" in favor of "race consciousness" and other assorted identity politics, which led to hyper-focus on superficial characteristics like skin color, has done more to foster racism than anything else in the last few decades.
- jameshart 3y ago
  The Simpsons features non-yellow characters. Yellow characters are white. Lego actually is a stronger precedent for ‘yellow is what color you make a person when you don’t mean to identify race’. Once they started adding movie character minifigs they introduced white skin as well. But the journey there also gives the lie to ‘yellow minifigs we’re never coded white’. The very first Star Wars Lego sets shipped with yellow minifigs for characters like Luke, Leia and Han. It was only once they started to think about shipping characters like Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu that they realized ‘wait a minute, we’re never going to get away with a yellow Lando’. (And actually around the same time they were also dealing with releasing NBA player minifigs.. the decisionmaking at Lego must have been pretty complicated at the time)