10 ms·

I sympathize. But this does also fall a little into the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them

I sympathize. But this does also fall a little into the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow; while all the other Star Wars characters they had already made yellow without a second thought rather gave the game away that maybe yellow minifigs are actually white people. And it’s not a fluke: The Simpsons are exactly the same. The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.

aendruk 1y ago
Is it specified that semantically neutral appear yellow or is the color free to vary by implementation/user preference?
- jameshart 1y ago
  Unicode says > When a human emoji is not immediately followed by an emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as RGB #FFCC22 (one of the colors typically used for the smiley faces). https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity
adamrezich 1y ago
The “LEGO (race) problem” was only a problem once LEGO began licensing IP (it was NBA first, not Star Wars, actually) and had to make minifigs to match real people. Before that, minifigs were perfectly raceless, able to abstractly represent whatever sort of characters that children could imagine—just like the yellow emojis. Yellow minifigs aren't “white”—they're “LEGO people”. Any other interpretation is post-hoc historical revisionism imagining past racial bias in domains where it was never present. Yellow LEGO minifigs (1978) predate The Simpsons (1987). There is no evidence to my knowledge that the latter was directly influenced by the former, such that the “yellow minifigs = white” line of reasoning makes any sense at all.
- adammarples 1y ago
  One doesn't have to have influenced the other, it's just pretty obvious that Matt Groening and the mostly white 70's Danes chose yellow as a cartoonish white skin colour surrogate, it's not a fluke, as the other commenter says.
  - adamrezich 1y ago
    Honest question: do you see Caucasian features in the default yellow smiley face ideogram? When Wal-Mart used it as their logo, was that an attempt to market toward white people specifically? When a Japanese guy drew the first widely-used set of emoji, do you think he was doing so under the auspices of white supremacy (so strongly that he didn't even notice the “yellow = Asian” racist stereotype he was obviously participating in)?
    - jameshart 1y ago
      Well now you’re bringing white supremacy into a conversation that is more about white defaultism. Nobody is saying that yellow emoji are white supremacist propaganda. The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. And when dark skinned people choose to use skin tone emoji for themselves it is just a bit kind of weird (just weird; not racist, not white supremacist) for white people to carry on using the yellow version. And then it’s especially weird to continue to insist that it’s racially neutral in the face of the evidence that it really isn’t.
      - adamrezich 1y ago
        > The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.
        jameshart 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Findecanor 1y ago
LEGO is different from The Simpsons in that LEGO bricks for a long time were limited to seven colours: the four primary colours, white, black and light grey. The first "proto-minifigs" in 1975 were still relatively abstract: made of bricks, albeit special bricks. The yellow head had the same shape as now but had no facial features.
lmm 1y ago
> Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow Why couldn't he? I would say the people who insist Lando must be othered in this way are the people who are being weird here, not the people who used yellow for characters whose race didn't matter to them.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  Because he wouldn't be recognizable? It would be like making Yoda pink or R2D2 black.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > Because he wouldn't be recognizable? Why not? Did anyone try mocking it up? His facial hair would show up fine against yellow. If the white characters were recognisable with yellow heads, why wouldn't it work for him?
    - spagettnet 1y ago
      https://hallofbricks.shop/cdn/shop/files/lego_starwars_minifigure_lando_calrissian.png?v=1739338947&width=1200 https://hallofbricks.shop/cdn/shop/files/lego_starwars_minif... (original) https://imgur.com/a/KzlTbO2 https://imgur.com/a/KzlTbO2 (gpt 5 - yellow plastic)
      - adastra22 1y ago
        Looks fine to me?
        ben_w 1y ago
        Not disagreeing, but as a bonus they can reuse the head and hair pieces for Tom Selleck in any Magnum, P.I. sets they might make.
      - AlanYx 1y ago
saurik 1y ago
We should go with purple. Nobody is even close to being purple. Hell: depending on your semantics, purple isn't even a real color. (Blue, of course, might should be reserved for AIs ;P.)
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  [flagged]
f33d5173 1y ago
Yellow doesn't represent anything, it represents nothing. It's a blank hole that people can fill in with their biases. White people will picture it to be white, black people can imagine it being black. That becomes a problem when you want to represent a black character, to a bunch of white people, who consider him being black an important part of his character. In other words it's (very deliberately) a bad tool for talking about race.
account42 1y ago
The trap is thinking that because some creative works have made the mistake of assigning realistic skin tones to some characters based on race that we now need to repeat the same instead of learning from it.
- jameshart 1y ago
  Ah - I’m not actually making an argument on the subject of whether adding skin tone emojis is a good idea. I’m just saying that, once they exist, white people getting upset about it and refusing to switch away from yellow is a weird hill to die on.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > I’m just saying that, once they exist, white people getting upset about it and refusing to switch away from yellow is a weird hill to die on. It isn't, because they know they won't be treated fairly if they do. This is why you can immerse yourself in a context where the large majority of people are white, but see brown and black skin tone emoji vastly more often than you see white skin tone emoji. And describing this reluctance to use the white emoji as "getting upset" is a part of the same memeplex that discourages them from taking part in the first place. Someone can argue that you, as a white person, are wrong no matter what you do (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-emoji-skin-tone-you-choose-matters/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-emoji-skin-tone-you-choo... — and please note how condescending and unhelpful the conclusion is, and the frankly antagonistic worldview it presents), but at least by sticking with the default you can say that you didn't put conscious effort into being wrong. But even beyond that, the so-called "colour-blindness" is supposed to be a core liberal value, and I'm not giving it up. If I am called racist for doing what I used to be counseled to do so as not to be racist, then I am being abused.
    - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
      Can you support your statement that this particular kind of color blindness is a core liberal value?
sssilver 1y ago
> The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color. I come from a country where almost nobody is white, and pretty much everyone is happily using the yellow emojis. As a not-white person I hate the skin colored emojis. I find them to be a ridiculous waste of human thought, effort, and time.
- aspect0545 1y ago
  I think it makes sense that in a country where the majority is not white the yellow emoji is picked to represent the majority.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    So you'd think white people in a minority white country would not use the standard emoji? I doubt anyone would care.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  the problem is that some countries have majority skin colors and significant minority skin colors, and the majority has not been nice to the minority, so in those countries it's an issue and they sort of export the problem to everybody else via a process of memetic transferal.
- anon1395 1y ago
  You might want to watch this. https://youtu.be/2ltWVmsbJxc https://youtu.be/2ltWVmsbJxc
noAnswer 1y ago
> The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color. I thought the skin color thing is silly until I saw this vine. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9ZLq1iLCc6g https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9ZLq1iLCc6g Apparently it is important to some. So I stopped complaining.
wodenokoto 1y ago
I'm pretty sure the yellow colour for emoji was chosen by NTT in Japan
- blacklion 1y ago
  I remember ICQ and early forum software with yellow smiles (emoji was not a word yet). First NTT eonji set is 1999 according to Wikipedia, and ICQ is 1996-1998 (I'm not sure, that first version contains graphical smiles, but 1998 one for sure had ones). Starting my online life in FIDO, with its deep and reach culture of text smiles (a hundreds of them were invented and tens of them were in wide circulation) I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.
  - lttlrck 1y ago
    I remember thinking emoji are cheating. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - resize2996 1y ago
      Unicode is absolutely cheating. ;) :P
  - throw0101d 1y ago
    > […] I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles. What I don't like is when software/services try to be 'clever' / 'helpful' and 'translate' ASCII smileys into emojis. At this point I have to `backtick` sometimes to keep them as-is.
throw0101d 1y ago
> But this does also fall a little into the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow […] If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality (of yellow)?
giaour 1y ago
I get it, but I still wish I could use a non-realistic skin tone to match my mood instead of my body. Sometimes I'm really into your suggestion of Taco Bell for lunch and want to give it a rainbow sparkle thumbs up.
zahlman 1y ago
> the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure Your analysis is ahistorical. A simple image search shows that LEGO figures were not, in fact, all yellow all the time, e.g. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/LEGO-Minifigure-40-Years-Infographic.jpg https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/... In fact, Lando's own colour varies across editions. You might also have pointed out that they didn't make Yoda yellow, either. More importantly: the earlier figures, when they were "yellow", were definitely more subtle shades that could more realistically represent "white people", who were overwhelmingly the original audience (since the toy was invented in Denmark, and we're talking about a period long before the modern political sensibilities around "diversity and inclusion"). It seems clear to me that there was a goal of something like realism for a long time, and that goal continues with licensed figures. Skin tones are just kinda hard to do in most artistic media. That history also predates Unicode emoji. If anything, LEGO has settled on a specific shade of yellow for "generic" people because of the ubiquity of emoji. > The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color. My experience strongly indicates that white people overwhelmingly "were fine being yellow", and that there are two clear reasons for it: * They suspect that not-white people who choose a colour are trying to make a point of their not-white status for political or ideological reasons, often in a context where there's no good reason for it to matter * They worry that if they choose the "white" skin tone that they'll be perceived as trying to make the same point about being white, and furthermore that doing so may attract strong negative attention, in the form of rhetoric about "white supremacy". My experience also strongly indicates that both these ideas are entirely reasonable to hold. In practice, the "dark" skin tones are an option that not-white people have to draw attention to themselves (and they often choose not to); the one "light" skin tone is only every used ironically to make a political point. It's well understood that people with a specific range of skin appearance are, for historical reasons specific to one part of the world (which is not where emoji originally come from), not permitted to take "pride" (whatever that means, when referring to something you can't meaningfully change about yourself) in the fact of having that skin appearance, while everyone else is. And of course, hardly anyone would be comfortable using emojis that deliberately misrepresent their own skin tone, except by "choosing" yellow — because yellow is seen as the default, by everyone. (Because it also structurally is, the way Unicode works, and the way that emoji-selection UIs work. People will commonly see the yellow versions as a failure or refusal to choose, rather than as a choice.)

aendruk 1y ago

Is it specified that semantically neutral appear yellow or is the color free to vary by implementation/user preference?

jameshart 1y ago
Unicode says > When a human emoji is not immediately followed by an emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as RGB #FFCC22 (one of the colors typically used for the smiley faces). https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity

adamrezich 1y ago

The “LEGO (race) problem” was only a problem once LEGO began licensing IP (it was NBA first, not Star Wars, actually) and had to make minifigs to match real people. Before that, minifigs were perfectly raceless, able to abstractly represent whatever sort of characters that children could imagine—just like the yellow emojis. Yellow minifigs aren't “white”—they're “LEGO people”. Any other interpretation is post-hoc historical revisionism imagining past racial bias in domains where it was never present. Yellow LEGO minifigs (1978) predate The Simpsons (1987). There is no evidence to my knowledge that the latter was directly influenced by the former, such that the “yellow minifigs = white” line of reasoning makes any sense at all.

adammarples 1y ago
One doesn't have to have influenced the other, it's just pretty obvious that Matt Groening and the mostly white 70's Danes chose yellow as a cartoonish white skin colour surrogate, it's not a fluke, as the other commenter says.
- adamrezich 1y ago
  Honest question: do you see Caucasian features in the default yellow smiley face ideogram? When Wal-Mart used it as their logo, was that an attempt to market toward white people specifically? When a Japanese guy drew the first widely-used set of emoji, do you think he was doing so under the auspices of white supremacy (so strongly that he didn't even notice the “yellow = Asian” racist stereotype he was obviously participating in)?
  - jameshart 1y ago
    Well now you’re bringing white supremacy into a conversation that is more about white defaultism. Nobody is saying that yellow emoji are white supremacist propaganda. The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. And when dark skinned people choose to use skin tone emoji for themselves it is just a bit kind of weird (just weird; not racist, not white supremacist) for white people to carry on using the yellow version. And then it’s especially weird to continue to insist that it’s racially neutral in the face of the evidence that it really isn’t.
    - adamrezich 1y ago
      > The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.
      - jameshart 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Findecanor 1y ago

LEGO is different from The Simpsons in that LEGO bricks for a long time were limited to seven colours: the four primary colours, white, black and light grey. The first "proto-minifigs" in 1975 were still relatively abstract: made of bricks, albeit special bricks. The yellow head had the same shape as now but had no facial features.

lmm 1y ago

> Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow Why couldn't he? I would say the people who insist Lando must be othered in this way are the people who are being weird here, not the people who used yellow for characters whose race didn't matter to them.

decimalenough 1y ago
Because he wouldn't be recognizable? It would be like making Yoda pink or R2D2 black.
- lmm 1y ago
  > Because he wouldn't be recognizable? Why not? Did anyone try mocking it up? His facial hair would show up fine against yellow. If the white characters were recognisable with yellow heads, why wouldn't it work for him?
  - spagettnet 1y ago
    https://hallofbricks.shop/cdn/shop/files/lego_starwars_minifigure_lando_calrissian.png?v=1739338947&width=1200 https://hallofbricks.shop/cdn/shop/files/lego_starwars_minif... (original) https://imgur.com/a/KzlTbO2 https://imgur.com/a/KzlTbO2 (gpt 5 - yellow plastic)
    - adastra22 1y ago
      Looks fine to me?
      - ben_w 1y ago
        Not disagreeing, but as a bonus they can reuse the head and hair pieces for Tom Selleck in any Magnum, P.I. sets they might make.
    - AlanYx 1y ago

saurik 1y ago

We should go with purple. Nobody is even close to being purple. Hell: depending on your semantics, purple isn't even a real color. (Blue, of course, might should be reserved for AIs ;P.)

DonHopkins 1y ago
[flagged]

f33d5173 1y ago

Yellow doesn't represent anything, it represents nothing. It's a blank hole that people can fill in with their biases. White people will picture it to be white, black people can imagine it being black. That becomes a problem when you want to represent a black character, to a bunch of white people, who consider him being black an important part of his character. In other words it's (very deliberately) a bad tool for talking about race.

account42 1y ago

The trap is thinking that because some creative works have made the mistake of assigning realistic skin tones to some characters based on race that we now need to repeat the same instead of learning from it.

jameshart 1y ago
Ah - I’m not actually making an argument on the subject of whether adding skin tone emojis is a good idea. I’m just saying that, once they exist, white people getting upset about it and refusing to switch away from yellow is a weird hill to die on.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > I’m just saying that, once they exist, white people getting upset about it and refusing to switch away from yellow is a weird hill to die on. It isn't, because they know they won't be treated fairly if they do. This is why you can immerse yourself in a context where the large majority of people are white, but see brown and black skin tone emoji vastly more often than you see white skin tone emoji. And describing this reluctance to use the white emoji as "getting upset" is a part of the same memeplex that discourages them from taking part in the first place. Someone can argue that you, as a white person, are wrong no matter what you do (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-emoji-skin-tone-you-choose-matters/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-emoji-skin-tone-you-choo... — and please note how condescending and unhelpful the conclusion is, and the frankly antagonistic worldview it presents), but at least by sticking with the default you can say that you didn't put conscious effort into being wrong. But even beyond that, the so-called "colour-blindness" is supposed to be a core liberal value, and I'm not giving it up. If I am called racist for doing what I used to be counseled to do so as not to be racist, then I am being abused.
  - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
    Can you support your statement that this particular kind of color blindness is a core liberal value?

sssilver 1y ago

> The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color. I come from a country where almost nobody is white, and pretty much everyone is happily using the yellow emojis. As a not-white person I hate the skin colored emojis. I find them to be a ridiculous waste of human thought, effort, and time.

aspect0545 1y ago
I think it makes sense that in a country where the majority is not white the yellow emoji is picked to represent the majority.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  So you'd think white people in a minority white country would not use the standard emoji? I doubt anyone would care.
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
the problem is that some countries have majority skin colors and significant minority skin colors, and the majority has not been nice to the minority, so in those countries it's an issue and they sort of export the problem to everybody else via a process of memetic transferal.
anon1395 1y ago
You might want to watch this. https://youtu.be/2ltWVmsbJxc https://youtu.be/2ltWVmsbJxc

noAnswer 1y ago

> The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color. I thought the skin color thing is silly until I saw this vine. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9ZLq1iLCc6g https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9ZLq1iLCc6g Apparently it is important to some. So I stopped complaining.

wodenokoto 1y ago

I'm pretty sure the yellow colour for emoji was chosen by NTT in Japan

blacklion 1y ago
I remember ICQ and early forum software with yellow smiles (emoji was not a word yet). First NTT eonji set is 1999 according to Wikipedia, and ICQ is 1996-1998 (I'm not sure, that first version contains graphical smiles, but 1998 one for sure had ones). Starting my online life in FIDO, with its deep and reach culture of text smiles (a hundreds of them were invented and tens of them were in wide circulation) I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.
- lttlrck 1y ago
  I remember thinking emoji are cheating. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - resize2996 1y ago
    Unicode is absolutely cheating. ;) :P
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > […] I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles. What I don't like is when software/services try to be 'clever' / 'helpful' and 'translate' ASCII smileys into emojis. At this point I have to `backtick` sometimes to keep them as-is.

throw0101d 1y ago

> But this does also fall a little into the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure and it became extremely obvious that he couldn’t be yellow […] If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality (of yellow)?

giaour 1y ago

I get it, but I still wish I could use a non-realistic skin tone to match my mood instead of my body. Sometimes I'm really into your suggestion of Taco Bell for lunch and want to give it a rainbow sparkle thumbs up.

zahlman 1y ago

> the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure Your analysis is ahistorical. A simple image search shows that LEGO figures were not, in fact, all yellow all the time, e.g. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/LEGO-Minifigure-40-Years-Infographic.jpg https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/... In fact, Lando's own colour varies across editions. You might also have pointed out that they didn't make Yoda yellow, either. More importantly: the earlier figures, when they were "yellow", were definitely more subtle shades that could more realistically represent "white people", who were overwhelmingly the original audience (since the toy was invented in Denmark, and we're talking about a period long before the modern political sensibilities around "diversity and inclusion"). It seems clear to me that there was a goal of something like realism for a long time, and that goal continues with licensed figures. Skin tones are just kinda hard to do in most artistic media. That history also predates Unicode emoji. If anything, LEGO has settled on a specific shade of yellow for "generic" people because of the ubiquity of emoji. > The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color. My experience strongly indicates that white people overwhelmingly "were fine being yellow", and that there are two clear reasons for it: * They suspect that not-white people who choose a colour are trying to make a point of their not-white status for political or ideological reasons, often in a context where there's no good reason for it to matter * They worry that if they choose the "white" skin tone that they'll be perceived as trying to make the same point about being white, and furthermore that doing so may attract strong negative attention, in the form of rhetoric about "white supremacy". My experience also strongly indicates that both these ideas are entirely reasonable to hold. In practice, the "dark" skin tones are an option that not-white people have to draw attention to themselves (and they often choose not to); the one "light" skin tone is only every used ironically to make a political point. It's well understood that people with a specific range of skin appearance are, for historical reasons specific to one part of the world (which is not where emoji originally come from), not permitted to take "pride" (whatever that means, when referring to something you can't meaningfully change about yourself) in the fact of having that skin appearance, while everyone else is. And of course, hardly anyone would be comfortable using emojis that deliberately misrepresent their own skin tone, except by "choosing" yellow — because yellow is seen as the default, by everyone. (Because it also structurally is, the way Unicode works, and the way that emoji-selection UIs work. People will commonly see the yellow versions as a failure or refusal to choose, rather than as a choice.)