You have to pick some skin tone for the default; just floating features would be off putting.
Believing that the pan-white default of “simpsons yellow” is raceless because you feel represented in it excludes that others might not feel represented in it. And it’s a small thing to have fixed that costs you basically nothing.
Well-meaning white people have been duped by a vocal minority of non-whites, who themselves were duped by cynical, washed out 60s radicals with bad ideas who failed to achieve anything in their time. You have been encouraged to treat non-whites like child emperors in your midst, whose every whim and dictate can only lead the way to racial harmony and absolution of your inherited sins. This is madness, and it's embarrassing for me and other right-thinking people to witness.
>Believing that the pan-white default of “simpsons yellow” is raceless because you feel represented in it excludes that others might not feel represented in it.
What race is Milhouse, with his blue hair?
We are still talking about adding some code points to Unicode here, right? Or did I miss something?
I agree it shouldn’t be a big deal, but it also isn’t a large change to offer skin tones as an option for people who want them. You can simply not use them if you don’t want to.
> What race is Milhouse, with his blue hair?
Not Indian or Black. Almost certainly he reads as white to most people. The blue hair and yellow skin was not meant to signify the characters place outside of race, it was a stylistic consequence of them not having hairlines
https://www.her.ie/entertainment/simpsons-writers-reveals-fa...
https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Category:African-American_C...
This is a matter of representation and inclusion, which are worthwhile goals that should matter to people in positions to make decisions.
Also, this is trivial and doesn't matter.
>Not Indian or Black. Almost certainly he reads as white to most people. The blue hair and yellow skin was not meant to signify the characters place outside of race, it was a stylistic consequence of them not having hairlines
No, you miss the point. It's a creatively liberal work, and viewing it through a racial lens is
1. a choice of the viewer
2. provides a flawed and inconsistent mapping back to human race
3. pathological
The fact that you engage the question and believe there is a sincere answer is the evidence of pathology, IMO. It shows a commitment to read race into everything, instead of acknowledging that blue-haired people don't exist, and so it's quite likely that the project of mapping a phylogeny back to homo sapiens is dubious.
What you're doing is exactly analogous to a hypothetical person claiming that the Simpsons was a pioneer in pro-ablism art and culture, because all characters have four fingers. It's pareidolia.
Can we at least agree on that or is that too a sign of some “pathology” on my part?
Then, if that’s true, and we think it’s a problem, adding more skin tones seems to me like a trivial fix; but this particular fix being of little cost does not cheapen the wider problems of diversity and inclusion.
I agree it's a trivial change. To me the underlying issue is that, were it some non-racial domain this issue occured in, most people would have no problem seeing the claim that something so petty and insignificant has actually caused deep injury to my identity for what it is: absurd and possibly deranged. It's only when it comes to race that well meaning people are content to accept such absurd positions, thereby infantilizing the complainant.
And my real issue is that when you do that, it has been my observation that it changes your assumptions about all of "us". So I resent the default assumption that I am weak or need coddling, which is an assumption that I see many of your persuasion holding. (Acknowledging that some assumptions were made on my part just now as well)
It isn't such a small thing - beyond making a bunch more work for a bunch of people, beyond picking which N other colors get recommended, beyond complicating UIs for all messaging apps, you've now raised the stakes and potentially introduced race into every message. Why didn't Sarah use the slightly darker thumbs up for me, when I'm slight darker than average? She must be a racist!
This really does happen -- I recently had someone complain about a person who only spoke somewhat broken English (as a second language), for not using inclusive language, and they specifically held it against them when selecting them for service (which has nothing to do with DEI issues).
My response was yeah sure.
If it is not a real skin tone it is neutral and i would feel just as attached to it and feel it is raceless equally as bright yellow. I don't feel anymore or less represented either.
*edited for spelling
The situation was, people chose yellow as the default, and that excluded some people. So, if we cared about being polite and fixing it for those people, and if our options were to either change to some hideous magenta that couldn’t be misinterpreted as representing a real skin tone vs just offering more skin tones, I think we made the right choice.
It makes sense that that's why they made the other emoticons yellow.
IMHO This: :-) is an emoji. These new-fangled things on our phones are tiny pictures. As pictures they communicate differently than ascii characters because they are a different medium.
But that horse has left the barn...
;-)
No, that's an emoticon. Now get off my lawn.
The first time a black coworker gave a black thumbs-up reaction on slack, I noticed I didn't want to +1 it. I didn't identify with it, it didn't feel like it was coming from me. This was a strong reaction and totally unexpected, and it was a "holy shit" moment as well, because I suddenly imagined how excluded I would have felt if that had been the only option for years.
Here's SoftBank's 2006 emoji set (well before any western companies got involved):
But it'd be nice to not have to think about it the first place.
Why wouldn’t you identify with a +1 from a black (or other race/ethnicity) colleague?
The question is a bit aggressive, but if possible don’t consider it like that — I live in an (unfortunately rather conservative) part of the EU and TBH I’m often surprised with the race/diversity activism. I usually support them, if nothing else then because I’m clearly ignorant and not affected by the challenges some of my coworkers have to put on with.
So GP didn’t want to click the black thumbs up to react using the same emoji, because GP didn’t think that a black thumbs up represented him, and would rather react with a yellow or white thumbs up.
GP is then just saying that non-white coworkers probably feel the same about the yellow thumbs up emoji.
Ultimately using emoji is about expressing oneself, and skin colour is a big part of peoples identity (for better or worse). So it makes sense that they want their expressions using emoji to represent their identity.
But more importantly, why shouldn't a black person be able to use a black emoji? We have the technology.
That said, I agree with the GP, who the hell says "I don't approve of unnecessarily gendered emoji"? I mean, fine, then don't use them.
Or other commenters that felt uncomfortable plus-oneing emojis that didn't match their skin tone. Really?? I upvote these things all the time without a second thought because it just means I agree with you, not that we're the same shade. I think it's kind of sad when literally every mundane action, even something as trivial as upvoting someone's comment, can only be seen through the prism of race first and foremost.
As long as there's racism (in any direction), color matters. You can't treat or think of people differently on the basis of race without knowing who is in what race.
The last thing "woke" people want is for discrimination on the basis of race to disappear, or for the color of people's skin to no longer factor in to how they are judged or treated.
Edit: agreed with a below commenter, and thanks for the correction. There isn't any such thing as "racism in reverse", just racism.
>Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political". It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities". This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.
He was a formidable and worthy opponent on the debate stage, and by all accounts one of the most kind, thoughtful, personable, and affable people off the stage.
Because making everything about race is how we fight racism... somehow...
>The point is that no one should care about race, but everyone all of the sudden is.
This doesn't read like the opinion of someone who isn't angry about something.
What races are they discriminating against? What racial stereotypes are they expressing?
I think the idea that you feel somehow wrong using images to express yourself that are the color of a different race is just a little racist.
You are saying that we should not care, but you clearly care if the face is black ... So, somebody decided that he would like to have a black emoji because he like it that and you decided to make an issue out of it ... and accuse the other person of what you yourself are doing ... If you don't see it is because you don't want to see it.
"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"