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'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/
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”.