This all reaction reminds me of the “new” skin tone palette of band aids: some people were happy with the change, and it seems to me the impact for everyone else who liked the standard ones was null.
But there was sooooo many reactions against the very idea that more than one color was now available.
With emoji people took a neutral non-racial thing and inserted race into it. In addition to the complexity of doing that well it just puts race and all the identity issues tied to it into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this generally makes things worse.
With emoji, it’s different - it’s explicitly about inserting race into a place it didn’t need to be. I think this type of thing is generally worse for society. It leads to people thinking about our differences more than our similarities.
But was it really?
Serious question: Do you think that if the majority of people in the US, and particularly the majority of middle and upper classes and tech folk, were Black that they would have defaulted to a yellow color for emoji?
That's not even getting into how all the "man" "woman" "child" etc emoji had stereotypical white-people hair etc.
I’d argue the direction should be towards generality not identity specificity.
I’m not dogmatic and obviously my point of view on this is a lost cause, but I generally think the universalist ideal is better and should be the goal.
I do think yellow was intentionally chosen to be universal and not to be read as “white”.
I'm guessing yellow was chosen to match the yellow "smiley face" which few had objected to historically
[0] https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/boy/
[1] https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/person-wearing-turban/
Emojis are the same to me, in that they were introduced with very limited scope (original ones were simple outlines, with bright pink, blue or green faces). Then expanded and got more detailed, less caricatural, and stopped fitting a single byte.
IMO the can of worm got opened the moment we got detailed drawings with artistic choices that best match one category of people. We have shown we weren't limited in number, and accepted a ton of complexity to deal with flags or gender representations for instance, it would be tone-deaf to just go on saying it's too complex to also care about racial representations where they might apply.
If you're arguing for getting back to simple outlines of random colors, I'm with you. But I think we're not in a stable place right now to say "we made enough diversification, let's just stop here".
Yes that is what I want. I basically agree with everything you said - I just wish we chose generality over specificity.
You have it - use the yellow emoji.
If that's not good enough, then commission your own emoji font. Or, don't use emojis/don't use Unicode. And let other people communicate in the way that they want.
I do use the neutral colors, I just think inserting identity into something is a worse outcome. Generality would be better.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27049269
Or this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27049517
Identity is extremely important to communication - I, personally, am communicating my opinion to you, personally.
If you want to stick to [what you consider] neutral or impersonal language in whatever aspect, you can. That option hasn't been removed from you.
If you want to impose your preference on others, that is to prevent other people from communicating effectively. I don't respect that.
Race is socially constructed, lines between 'races' dissolve and change over time. Reinforcing our differences in software and communication unnecessarily over arbitrary categorizations and physical characteristics is worse for society (imo).
I think people should generally have the freedom to do what they want, but defaults and incentives matter - it's better to choose ones that lead to a better outcome when possible. That's all I'm getting at.
Emojis literally offer people the choice to use "Light Skin Tone", "Medium-Light Skin Tone", "Medium Skin Tone", "Medium-Dark Skin Tone" and "Dark Skin Tone".
Those are not racial differentiators.
If it was just hair color or something it would be different. It shouldn't be different (imo) and hopefully we eventually get to a world where they're just physical attributes. I just don't see this kind of thing helping in the mean time.
And now we have superheroes band aids, Elsa band aids, transformers band aids, teddy bear band aids.