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Comment by paisawalla | Hacker News Reader

I say this as a non-white person who ostensibly should feel better represented by these emojis: a person who feels anxiety or exclusion when they see a yellow "thumbs up" is someone who has a low grade mental illness in need of address.

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?

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> 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.

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...

>We are still talking about adding some code points to Unicode here, right? Or did I miss something?

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.

It’s not about me reading race into the Simpsons, I am saying that the “simpsons yellow” was not intended as a pan-racial skin tone and does not read that way for many people. The fact that minority characters are given a different skin tone than yellow, and the statements of the cartoonists suggest to me that the creators themselves do not view it that way, so it does not seem unreasonable for other people to not accept “simpsons yellow” as a pan-racial skin tone.

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.

Look, to me this is as preposterous as someone complaining that the eggplant and peach emojis should come in various shades. They aren't meant to be literal representations of your junk, and a yellow "thumbs up" is not meant to represent your actual hand. It's meant to represent your approval.

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)

There is something at best blind, and more likely to my mind, dishonest about the "It's just a trivial change" argument. It's used to bludgeon dissent. "You can't possibly be such a jerk you'd not do this small thing"

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).

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