I’m asking because as a light-skinned male, I always use the standard Simpsons yellow. I don’t really see other light-skinned people using an emoji that matches their skin tone, but often do see people of color use them. Maybe white people don’t naturally realize a need to be explicit with emoji skin-tone or perhaps it’s seen as implicitly identifying or requesting white privilege.
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Is there a significance to using skin-tone emojis, and if so, what is it?
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Assuming there might be a racial movement attached to the first question, how does my use of emojis, both Simpsons yellow and light-skin, interact with or contribute to that?
Note: I am an autistic white Latino-American cis-gendered man that aims to be socially just.
Autistic text stim: blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 !!
I dunno, I mean they do it with LEGO men now, but Simpsons or LEGO yellow skin only belongs on people so jaundiced that it’s a miracle they’re not dead. Same with the more feminine Lego women. What ever happened to that same stupid smile and just switch the hair piece? I mean if it makes you happy I guess, it ain’t hurting nobody. I feel neither represented nor unrepresented by a cartoon yellow face. Maybe it’s just because I’m white, I dunno. You do you I guess.
I’m pale and I use the pale emoji, feels more like me.
I never really used the yellow ones. 🤷🏼
I use the one with my hair color. For things like thumbs up I stick with yellow
It’s about personal preference for sure. I tried to start using the “white” emojis and it just didn’t seem to matter. If I do use an emoji, I tend to default to the Simpsons yellow because it requires no extra effort. I don’t see a ton of people using the skin-tone emojis at all. I also have no issue with people using them much like pronouns in emails/profiles.
I’m also on iPhone so if I am going to extra mile I’ll just use my little sticker guy who better represents me in general.
In white as fuck ✌🏿
Yes, officer, this comment right here
🫱🏻🫲🏿
If they’re over the age of 16, there’s no significance to anyone that uses emojis.
👆🤣
I don’t use emoji very much. The most I use is when I’m working and sometime asks me to take on a task in Slack. There is a thumbs up all emoji that is just the skin tone shifting to all the colors. I like it because then I don’t have to give a fuck about it.
Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned. It’s a nice contrasting color to show the emotion and they have always done a good job representing everyone while serving their goal: to convey emotion in text.
The push for representation in emoji’s always struck me as weird since they already represented everyone. I rarely see people using them who aren’t a bit too focused on skin color in their day-to-day life.
That, and I think they trace a direct lineage back to the original Harvey Ross Ball smiley face, which was also yellow.
Me, I don’t particularly care about matching emoji skintones to myself. Rather, I’m much more annoyed that I can’t tune the 🏍️ emoji to match the color of my motorcycle. What a rip off.
I don’t feel represented. There isn’t a badass chrome and black cruiser emoji that makes a loud-ass rumble when you open the message, so I’m stuck with the fast and quiet Supersport 🏍.
Similarly, there’s no muscle car or hot hatch, just 🏎️🚗
Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned.
I use those ones because they’re closer to the top of the list, therefore faster to scroll to when I’m choosing an emoji.
…since they already represented everyone.
Did they really? Because if that were the case we wouldn’t have different skin tones for emojis with people claiming they feel more represented by them or happy to use them because they have the same skin tone.
Yes, they did. The Canadian flag represents all Canadians. The BC province flag may represent me more closely, but it doesn’t stop the Canada flag from doing the same. While some people will be happy they can represent themselves more accurately to real life, it also makes for more exclusive use cases. I think there’s an argument to be made for keeping things simple and broadly usable.
This came up in an anti-racism group I belonged to many years ago, where I learned to try to be aware of my acceptance of whiteness as “default” or somehow raceless. I also learned not to jump in and center myself in conversations about how race is (or worse, should be) perceived by those negatively affected or sensitive to it—or at least I thought I learned that, but here I am about to press send.
I came away from that conversation with an understanding that while I may feel that my race is immaterial to my identity and my point of view, it is nonetheless a real component of the context of my attitudes and online presence, so it’s valuable to ask if there’s a reason I’d want to hide it.
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blackfishing
Oh god please not another buzzword
Stop before you wake the tabloids
Blackfishing?
I thought we already had a term for when someone takes on someone else’s skin color something something cultural appropriation
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Is it considered poor taste to use darker emoji colors if you are white?
Intentions matter in these questions. You’ll know it when you see it if it is in bad taste.
Without necessarily offering an opinion myself, there’s absolutely a chance someone views it as being in poor taste, thus at the least I would avoid doing it outside of conversations with those you know well.
Only if you are using them to convey some kind of racist message or pretending to be someone of color.
Other responses are kind of fence-sitting so I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say yeah it’s poor taste, but forgiveable. I think it just boils down to why would you use a skin tone that’s not yours? Some people like having an emoji that’s they share with others of their color, so why intrude on that?
Like emoji blackface?
In one app I’m a girl with medium skin tone and dark hair. In another I’m a pale boy with red blond hair. No idea how either one was chosen.
The original emojis were white before the yellow and darker tones were added in 2015. Look up Katrina Parrott for the backstory. In short, before yellow was the default, White was the only option, and that’s kinda racist, and was only 9 years ago.
Yellow was simply a neutral addition to emojis that matched well with the existing yellow smiley face (which that French asshole keeps charging people for).
Thanks for questioning your assumptions. Further reading if you’re interested:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parrot+skin+tone+emoji+&t=ffip&ia=web
Also the first gen iPhone emoji were a Japanese add on pack, iirc a keyboard addition. I had to install this add on on my iphone3g while I lived in Japan. Those emoji had average Japanese skin which white people just assumed was white. Only after those optional emoji got popular did apple make it standard, android copied, then people got worried about range of skin tone seeing as the Unicode was a global standard.
Thank you, I had no idea the first phone emoji characters were a third party add-on. That explains how they got there, since Apple is pretty notorious for not including people shaped things in their art.
Emojis evolved from the smileys we had in the late 90s, which were mostly yellow, but could be in various colours, like red for the angry face. Those smileys evolved from the text versions like these :) or :D
Historically the original emojis were ascii so the symbol had the color of text on the electronic device where typed
:-)
¯_(ツ)_/¯
:(
And so on
Those were called emoticons back in the day.
Same same
emoji became a thing because the Japanese wanted pictures aka kanji style representation of the ascii expressions. In any regards OG skin tone was average Japanese
I just use the white as fuck guy because he has a green shirt (at least, on Android anyway) and I like green. Me being white as fuck is just a coincidence. 🤷🏻♂️
🤷🏻
I’m on Android and that shirt is definitely blue 🤷🏻♀️
I kinda like using emoji that are similar to my skintone. Not really making a statement, but somehow it feels a little more “me.” Hard to explain why it matters, it’s not like I won’t use the yellow ones if that’s all they have. Just kinda like “hehe, that’s a lil me in that message.”
I think the idea is that the default yellow is symbolic (with some “white people are the default” connotation) and now that you can choose the skin tone of your emojis, many people now select one that matches their skin tone.
My immediate opinion upon skin tone emoji being introduced was the mildest frustration: we’d had unified emoji for all Homo sapiens!
Then after seeing someone use their own skin tone for an emoji, I realized… oh, dang. They can feel represented now, potentially in a way they did not before.
I use yellow 100%. But not bad folks have options.
One neat thing is on Slack you may be able to see a hint of your company’s vibrant diversity if folks are reacting with all colors of emoji. Admittedly it could also look a little cluttered though maybe they are grouping reactions by symbol now.
On a related note, I’ve seen two people with very light (though non-white) skin tones use significantly darker skin tone emoji. One of those times I brought it up with someone else and they’re like “yeah what’s with that?!” Self image or eyesight related perhaps…
