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I apologize, you don’t seem to have followed my argument. Lego had already put out a number of licensed sets featuring specific ‘real people’ (Star Wars charac

I apologize, you don’t seem to have followed my argument. Lego had already put out a number of licensed sets featuring specific ‘real people’ (Star Wars characters) using just yellow minifigs. That changed in 2003 (same year as the NBA license) when they released the Cloud City set, and evidently came to the realization that they could not continue to use yellow for all characters. That set includes yellow Han and Leia minifigs, by the way - white skin tone minifigs came later. The point is that if the claim which, yes, Lego has made since 1978, that yellow was neutral and could represent any race – if that claim has any value, they could have proudly released 10123 Cloud City with a yellow Lando. They didn’t. Yellow turns out not to have been as neutral as they believed. Lando proves it. As for Lego vs the Simpsons I didn’t claim any causative influence between the two - just pointing out that Simpsons made the same choice, with yellow representing white people, and nonwhite people having different skin tones. Both Lego and the Simpsons have accidentally encoded a white default under a ‘nonrealistic color choice’. My point is that emojis have done exactly the same thing.

inanutshellus 1y ago
It's funny, because I think of emojis as entirely co-opted from the Japanese and so see the images in that context not having anything to do with LEGO or The Simpsons. The Japanese were SO COOL and ... lucky? with their extensive creativity making of the original text emojis that folk wanted to play along too... so picture emoijs came along.
- adamrezich 1y ago
  It's all downstream of yellow smiley faces (1950s)—raceless ideograms conveying a common emotion (happiness) that humans of all races happen to share—and I honestly have no idea how this seems to escape everyone today.
  - inanutshellus 1y ago
    Oh I agree. They're from the gold smiley face stickers extrapolated to more emotions. I meant that I _don't_ connect the gold to Simpsons and LEGO. I just connect the whole emoji concept to the Japanese and thus don't consider anything about it at all to be "white-centric". Once you do associate the smiley faces with LEGO/Simpsons then you do start to make these connections that... just don't need to be there and let the conversation get muddled in drama.
    - jameshart 1y ago
      Weird that you’re perceiving this as ‘drama’. I fear you think that this issue is in some way political. I’m not ‘connecting’ this to Lego and the Simpsons as if there’s some global yellow conspiracy. I’m pointing out that the arguments people make about yellow being ‘neutral’ when you go beyond abstract symbolism to personalization – as is happening with the co-opting of emoji to become personal ‘reactions’ – have been made before in similar circumstances and have proven to be quite weak.
      - francislavoie 1y ago
        It's not political so much as people of color want to use emojis they identify with, and it's very common for them not to identify with yellow because it's so much further from their own skin tone than yellow is to caucasians and asians
        nomdep 1y ago
        Emojis are about ideas. Believing that a skin color can tell everything there is about you (and thus "identifying" with one) is incredibly racist.
      - skissane 1y ago
        Historically the colour “yellow” was associated with East Asian people, not people of European descent-who for whatever reason got associated with the colour “white”, despite the fact European skin colour is more pinky/peachy (but getting more “olive” as one heads south). And keep in mind emoji were invented in Japan, where I don’t think anybody was thinking “yellow smiley face=European ancestry”
        jameshart 1y ago
        So there's a peculiar thing happening here. I pointed out that a particular color choice, using yellow for faces, made independently and for perfectly good aesthetic and design reasons and with benign intent by the designers of emoji, following in the illustrious, well trodden footsteps of the LEGO group and Mat Groening, has a particular cultural interpretation when placed alongside dark skin tone alternatives. Now, what a lot of people seem to have read into this is that I think the original designers of the emoji had racist intent. Or that I am at least accusing them of being passively racist. Likewise Lego and Mat Groening, presumably. That is a misreading of what I said. The statement 'this thing has a differential impact on people of different races' does not automatically mean 'the people responsible for this thing are being accused of perpetrating racism'. But apparently many readers assume that to be the case. So a lot of the replies I've gotten here seem to be leaping into some sort of culture-war defense of Lego, of yellow emoji, etc. Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?! Are you accusing NTT DoCoMo of promoting white supremacy? Like... really, no, that's not what I said, is it? I wrote about how the arrival of dark skinned options in a 'default yellow' world repeatedly reveals that 'default yellow' is, in Western culture, actually 'default white'. And that that repeated lesson explains why white people sticking with yellow isn't 'not choosing a skintone'. It's choosing white, but pretending not to. Because you don't have to.
  - account42 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      [flagged]
- account42 1y ago
  Pretending that emoticons are a Japanese invention is also a weird kind of historical revisionism.
  - taejo 1y ago
    Emojis, however, are a Japanese invention (related but different from emoticons). BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.
philwelch 1y ago
Lego only started licensing in 1999, and by the time they fully embraced it they had almost completely rejected their entire product philosophy. What really happened is that, by 2003, the company had been taken over by entirely different people who cared more about how much money they could make from licensing deals than about the original vision of their product. (Things have since improved marginally, partly as a response to backlash.)

inanutshellus 1y ago

It's funny, because I think of emojis as entirely co-opted from the Japanese and so see the images in that context not having anything to do with LEGO or The Simpsons. The Japanese were SO COOL and ... lucky? with their extensive creativity making of the original text emojis that folk wanted to play along too... so picture emoijs came along.

adamrezich 1y ago
It's all downstream of yellow smiley faces (1950s)—raceless ideograms conveying a common emotion (happiness) that humans of all races happen to share—and I honestly have no idea how this seems to escape everyone today.
- inanutshellus 1y ago
  Oh I agree. They're from the gold smiley face stickers extrapolated to more emotions. I meant that I _don't_ connect the gold to Simpsons and LEGO. I just connect the whole emoji concept to the Japanese and thus don't consider anything about it at all to be "white-centric". Once you do associate the smiley faces with LEGO/Simpsons then you do start to make these connections that... just don't need to be there and let the conversation get muddled in drama.
  - jameshart 1y ago
    Weird that you’re perceiving this as ‘drama’. I fear you think that this issue is in some way political. I’m not ‘connecting’ this to Lego and the Simpsons as if there’s some global yellow conspiracy. I’m pointing out that the arguments people make about yellow being ‘neutral’ when you go beyond abstract symbolism to personalization – as is happening with the co-opting of emoji to become personal ‘reactions’ – have been made before in similar circumstances and have proven to be quite weak.
    - francislavoie 1y ago
      It's not political so much as people of color want to use emojis they identify with, and it's very common for them not to identify with yellow because it's so much further from their own skin tone than yellow is to caucasians and asians
      - nomdep 1y ago
        Emojis are about ideas. Believing that a skin color can tell everything there is about you (and thus "identifying" with one) is incredibly racist.
    - skissane 1y ago
      Historically the colour “yellow” was associated with East Asian people, not people of European descent-who for whatever reason got associated with the colour “white”, despite the fact European skin colour is more pinky/peachy (but getting more “olive” as one heads south). And keep in mind emoji were invented in Japan, where I don’t think anybody was thinking “yellow smiley face=European ancestry”
      - jameshart 1y ago
        So there's a peculiar thing happening here. I pointed out that a particular color choice, using yellow for faces, made independently and for perfectly good aesthetic and design reasons and with benign intent by the designers of emoji, following in the illustrious, well trodden footsteps of the LEGO group and Mat Groening, has a particular cultural interpretation when placed alongside dark skin tone alternatives. Now, what a lot of people seem to have read into this is that I think the original designers of the emoji had racist intent. Or that I am at least accusing them of being passively racist. Likewise Lego and Mat Groening, presumably. That is a misreading of what I said. The statement 'this thing has a differential impact on people of different races' does not automatically mean 'the people responsible for this thing are being accused of perpetrating racism'. But apparently many readers assume that to be the case. So a lot of the replies I've gotten here seem to be leaping into some sort of culture-war defense of Lego, of yellow emoji, etc. Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?! Are you accusing NTT DoCoMo of promoting white supremacy? Like... really, no, that's not what I said, is it? I wrote about how the arrival of dark skinned options in a 'default yellow' world repeatedly reveals that 'default yellow' is, in Western culture, actually 'default white'. And that that repeated lesson explains why white people sticking with yellow isn't 'not choosing a skintone'. It's choosing white, but pretending not to. Because you don't have to.
- account42 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    [flagged]
account42 1y ago
Pretending that emoticons are a Japanese invention is also a weird kind of historical revisionism.
- taejo 1y ago
  Emojis, however, are a Japanese invention (related but different from emoticons). BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.

philwelch 1y ago

Lego only started licensing in 1999, and by the time they fully embraced it they had almost completely rejected their entire product philosophy. What really happened is that, by 2003, the company had been taken over by entirely different people who cared more about how much money they could make from licensing deals than about the original vision of their product. (Things have since improved marginally, partly as a response to backlash.)