It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.
It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...
When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)
The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.
I come from a country where almost nobody is white, and pretty much everyone is happily using the yellow emojis.
As a not-white person I hate the skin colored emojis. I find them to be a ridiculous waste of human thought, effort, and time.
Yellow minifigs aren't “white”—they're “LEGO people”.
Any other interpretation is post-hoc historical revisionism imagining past racial bias in domains where it was never present.
Yellow LEGO minifigs (1978) predate The Simpsons (1987). There is no evidence to my knowledge that the latter was directly influenced by the former, such that the “yellow minifigs = white” line of reasoning makes any sense at all.
Lego had already put out a number of licensed sets featuring specific ‘real people’ (Star Wars characters) using just yellow minifigs. That changed in 2003 (same year as the NBA license) when they released the Cloud City set, and evidently came to the realization that they could not continue to use yellow for all characters. That set includes yellow Han and Leia minifigs, by the way - white skin tone minifigs came later.
The point is that if the claim which, yes, Lego has made since 1978, that yellow was neutral and could represent any race – if that claim has any value, they could have proudly released 10123 Cloud City with a yellow Lando.
They didn’t. Yellow turns out not to have been as neutral as they believed. Lando proves it.
As for Lego vs the Simpsons I didn’t claim any causative influence between the two - just pointing out that Simpsons made the same choice, with yellow representing white people, and nonwhite people having different skin tones. Both Lego and the Simpsons have accidentally encoded a white default under a ‘nonrealistic color choice’.
My point is that emojis have done exactly the same thing.
I’m not ‘connecting’ this to Lego and the Simpsons as if there’s some global yellow conspiracy.
I’m pointing out that the arguments people make about yellow being ‘neutral’ when you go beyond abstract symbolism to personalization – as is happening with the co-opting of emoji to become personal ‘reactions’ – have been made before in similar circumstances and have proven to be quite weak.
I pointed out that a particular color choice, using yellow for faces, made independently and for perfectly good aesthetic and design reasons and with benign intent by the designers of emoji, following in the illustrious, well trodden footsteps of the LEGO group and Mat Groening, has a particular cultural interpretation when placed alongside dark skin tone alternatives.
Now, what a lot of people seem to have read into this is that I think the original designers of the emoji had racist intent. Or that I am at least accusing them of being passively racist. Likewise Lego and Mat Groening, presumably.
That is a misreading of what I said.
The statement 'this thing has a differential impact on people of different races' does not automatically mean 'the people responsible for this thing are being accused of perpetrating racism'. But apparently many readers assume that to be the case.
So a lot of the replies I've gotten here seem to be leaping into some sort of culture-war defense of Lego, of yellow emoji, etc.
Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?! Are you accusing NTT DoCoMo of promoting white supremacy?
Like... really, no, that's not what I said, is it? I wrote about how the arrival of dark skinned options in a 'default yellow' world repeatedly reveals that 'default yellow' is, in Western culture, actually 'default white'. And that that repeated lesson explains why white people sticking with yellow isn't 'not choosing a skintone'. It's choosing white, but pretending not to. Because you don't have to.
Are you talking about “Western culture”, or “progressive-leaning US(-centric) culture”? Because the idea that a colour choice made in Japan has some kind of racial meaning is much more strongly associated with the second than the first.
I genuinely don't understand how this claim can be sincerely made in the contemporary American political climate. The entire point of pointing at "differential impact" is to take the premise that it's an inherent moral wrong, and can be pursued regardless of the underlying cause, or of the intent of anyone involved. That's why the term "institutional racism" was coined.
>Emoji are Japanese, how can they possibly perpetuate default whiteness?!
That's the point. They cannot. That's exactly why your argument that "they really have represented white people all this time" (as with the LEGO figures) doesn't hold water.
> Like... really, no, that's not what I said, is it? I wrote about how the arrival of dark skinned options in a 'default yellow' world repeatedly reveals that 'default yellow' is, in Western culture, actually 'default white'. And that that repeated lesson explains why white people sticking with yellow isn't 'not choosing a skintone'. It's choosing white, but pretending not to. Because you don't have to.
This paragraph reads to me like you are trying very hard to claim that you didn't say what you said, by saying it again.
When people talk about the history of emojis, they're giving evidence that yellow isn't white. They're not accusing you of saying anything about history.
You are the one who started out the thread by suggesting that it's somehow weird that white people don't use white skin-tone emojis, while also arguing that "yellow-as-default" is somehow problematic and/or insincere.
Those are both plainly political. Identity politics, and racial politics, are politics. You are implying that people should change their real-world behaviour for reasons related to race.
You dont need to do that.
BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.
And not because they intentionally made yellow into white, but because they unintentionally made it so.
It's exactly the same as being an american vs being an african-american. You don't call white americans european-americans. Society (or media) assigned a racial default.
I'm gonna be a little more forward with this last argument: This is the product of mixed societies that have not dealt with racial bias and/or the consequences of racism well.
There is nothing wrong with the majority becoming seen as a default. It is inevitable, because defaults are useful, and choosing anything else would increase the fraction of the time that it's wrong.
We were talking about "yellow" being racially neutral according to lego and how that was proven wrong by lego themselves.
Same thing happened in US media (by media i mean all mediatic content).
Its the cause of racialized realities. It absolutely is the result of racist societies.
And sure, the majority being a single race is a neutral fact today. But how we got there is absolutely through a racist history.
The fact is that there already exists a racial default, I didn't make it, it simply exists due to the nuances of our society, its history and/or its media.
I didn't invent either term and I am not THE dictionary.
This is how these terms are interpreted by the world and also through simple logic. I am not the one who interprets these terms and their usage.
American society and culture is still severely segregated due to how crappily it dealt with the consequences of its racist history.
White americans are considered american and black americans are considered african americans. It is not a mutually exclusive truth, but it is the norm, and that's what we're talking about.
We're not talking about pure logic of meaning, we're talking about social usage of terms.
Or Italian American.
> White americans are considered american and black americans are considered african americans. It is not a mutually exclusive truth, but it is the norm, and that's what we're talking about.
African American is an alternative to "black". It was not invented to make a lesser form of "American". Your simple logic is just wrong, as these things frequently are.
Man, I'm not saying its lesser. I'm talking about how its used.
I think you want to assign morality to my arguments when im being as neutral as possible.
In some widespread contexts "american" is racially defaulted to white. Full stop.
Like I said were not talking about the pure logical meaning of words were talking about how society uses them.
Can you say what these widespread contexts are? Question mark.
As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.
And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.
This context is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
Well, as I say, Italian American is another one, and that's for white people. But more generally: these categories are (mostly) self-imposed (although I hear people who progressives would call "native American" actually call themselves "Indian"). African American is a substitute for "black", and driven by black Americans and progressives. It's a deliberate choice to enforce the label, just as it's a deliberate choice to have the n-word be, as they'd say, "our word". "people of color" is the same, although that's more an excluding category than an including one. This isn't coming from "systemic racism". It's coming from progressive academia, determined to re-divide America, and transitively everywhere else, in order to create some lovely social sciences problems to "solve".
Is it now your theory to say that "progressive academia" controls mass media?
Or do you think its fine to say that somehow viewers themselves control mass media?
The truth is advertisers and shareholders control mass media.
Your statement also hinges on the assumption that america was united, at least on racial issues, and is now trying to be divided.
Back to the media. Your argument also uses the same rationalization as anti-DEI folks who blame a diversity-conspiracy when in reality it was just corporations (capitalism) trying to appear cool and understanding for more shareholder value. Every minority knew it was mostly a marketing gimmick by corporations (i knew).
The analogy here is that you take something the media did for money and externalize it as a social-sciences conspiracy.
The biggest mistake the masses do is thinking what the media and corporations do for money actually represents the will of the masses. That is the culture war.
The fact of the matter is that there is a racial-default bias within mass media and little plastic toy companies (lego) due to historical contexts. There's also racial tip-toeing to avoid being seen as racist due to company reputation and shareholder value. You are focused on the latter.
No, this is a personal problem on your part.
As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.
And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.
It is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
I don't know why you think I would make this up, lol.
You're in far less danger of being accused of originality than you are of regurgitating banality.
Because it's false, as I demonstrated in my other comment.
What were civil rights issues about if not that "american" literally didn't apply to all of us on a constitutional/federal/state and cultural level?
You seem to be fixated on pointing out that ultimate neutrality has always existed when referencing the term "american" when everything proves otherwise.
And on top of that you want to say I'm biased because I'm pointing out that neutrality hasn't always existed around that term.
Chill out, dude.
Because in the current ((zeitgeist)) Europeans are not allowed to have a racial identity.
You’re a couple decades out of date. “African American” isn’t that commonly used anymore; the much more commonly used term is “black”. Or if you want to make a finer distinction, I’ve also seen the term ADOS (American Descendant of Slaves).
“Native American” is a neologism white liberals made up in the 1970’s because they didn’t like the term “American Indian”. It turns out almost all of the American Indians at the time preferred “American Indian” to “Native American”, but nobody actually asked them.
“European American” isn’t commonly used because at the same time that “African American” was popular, so was the idea that white people shouldn’t have a racial self identity at all so there was zero impetus to try and push a politically correct euphemism for “white”. Even today a common style decision is to always capitalize the term “black” but not the term “white”.
Furthermore, whenever we do talk about people in terms of nationality, such as during the Olympic Games, black Americans are consistently referred to as “Americans” rather than “African Americans”.
Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans. It’s just like whenever people talk about Japanese-American internment during WW2, they add “American” to underscore the injustice of treating US citizens that way. A Japanese national who wasn’t a US citizen could more justifiably be detained, just as Germans and Italians were, but treating Americans that way is beyond the pale.
What you’re doing here is taking a phrasing that was intentionally designed to use American patriotism to improve public perception of black people and twisting it around into yet another insidious form of crypto-anti-black racism using insane troll logic. And in that respect, you are the one missing the point.
I was explaining reasonings for lego defaulting yellow into white.
The defaulting of "american" into white does happen frequently in news headlines by simple fact of often referring to black people as "african americans" and white people simply as "americans".
And like someone else pointed out in the thread there have also been studies who have researched this topic. I think it's a real bias people/media seems to have.
You may have a point with your retelling of the history of terms, I dont really know and I wont pretend to know. Though i sense some racial resentment in you with your statement that white people shouldn't, or weren't allowed to, have a racial self identity. But that is beside the point.
> Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans.
I don't think it was to subjugate them I think those are after effects of this country who systemically subdued other races and identified itself as white. In part that will never go away because the majority is still white. But there is a latent bias in there. And that's what I'm pointing out.
You're trying to accuse me of "crypto-anti-black racism" when I point out that we come from a racist society. Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only. And that was almost 100 years AFTER slavery was abolished. The country was incredibly racist till relatively recently.
I am simply pointing out how the bias of a white nation still lives on in some way today and can be seen in the racial defaulting of little plastic figurine colors.
No, I'm saying you're accusing the people who coined the term "African American", or perhaps the term itself, of crypto anti-black racism.
> Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only.
80 years ago was 1945. Let me quote from the Richmond Times-Dispatch on August 5, 1936, reporting on the performance of Jesse Owens in the Olympics. If you have access to newspapers.com you can follow this link to a clipping I created: https://www.newspapers.com/article/richmond-times-dispatch-j...
> The weather turned blustery with the day's usual shower but Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler and another capacity crowd of 100,000 jammed the big concrete stadium most of the day with Owens as the main magnet.
> Der Fuehrer joined in terrific applause accorded the American ace whose performances now have thrilled upwards of 300,000 spectators three straight days and given the Olympic games their most outstanding individual performer since Paavo Nurmi's exploits of 1924 when the "Phantom Finn" won three gold medals.
> After fouling on his first trial in the finals, Owens jumped 26 feet 39-64 inch, finally 26 feet 5 21-64 inches while the stadium echoed with a roar that could be heard all over the Olympic plant.
89 years ago, an American newspaper--one in the south, no less--referred to Jesse Owens, without any further qualification, as "the American ace".
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on the same date: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-plain-dealer-owens-cl...
> AMERICANS ROUT WORLD IN OLYMPICS > Owens Cracks Broad Jump Record as U.S. Wins Four Events. ... > The United States track and field forces put the athletes from the rest of the world to rout today in one of the greatest field days any nation ever experienced in Olympic competition. > Four times the Stars and Stripes waved triumphantly from the victory flagpole as Uncle Sam's stalwarts staged a smashing exhibition of sprinting, leaping, and hurdling before a crowd of 110,000. > Americans made a clean sweep of all championships in the men's division, retaining their broad jump supremacy with a record-breaking Olympic leap by John Cleveland (Jesse) Owens, 22-year-old Ohio State Negro...
The story does state Owens' race in a dated and uncomfortable way. (Remind me, which one of us is arguing that it's awkward and uncomfortable to emphasize someone's race?) But note that prior to doing so, the article twice includes Owens in statements about "Americans" routing the world and making a clean sweep of championships, and lauds him as one of "Uncle Sam's stalwarts". I'm not saying that racism didn't exist in 1936 or that Jesse Owens was treated fairly, but there was no inhibition against referring to him, or any other black American, as an American whenever it was relevant to do so.
> And so how does this relate to legos?
I would be justified in asking you the same question. Legos are Danish. It's not actually clear how the history of American racism or the applicability of the term "American" to black people prior to 1945 has any bearing on the creative intent of a Danish toy manufacturer, and if anything it's a little ethnocentric to judge it in that context.
> (Remind me, which one of us is arguing that it's awkward and uncomfortable to emphasize someone's race?)
I don't think its awkward or uncomfortable to emphasize someones race. I'm mixed and I identify as both black and white, purposefully.
I can tell how deep you are into the culture war because you seem to be arguing right past me and with some imaginary figure of me that you have in your head.
Tell me what do you think the civil rights issues were/are about? Nah, ill tell you: That "american" didn't actually mean all of us on a constitutional/federal/state level and even cultural level.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm a sociology expert for internet points but there are many papers that show evidence of what I'm saying and they are not hard to find at all. Literally put a small amount of effort and you'll see at least 5 pop up. You can analyze their results if you want.
> Legos are Danish. It's not actually clear how the history of American racism or the applicability of the term "American" to black people prior to 1945 has any bearing on the creative intent of a Danish toy manufacturer, and if anything it's a little ethnocentric to judge it in that context.
Hilarious, dude. You totally lost the plot. I was using "american" vs "african american" bias as an analogy to explain the "yellow was universal" but that lego then decided to add brown lego figures. Yellow wasn't actually universal, yellow was white. White was then implicitly seen as universal.
The culture warrior has ended themselves.
He wasn’t even the only black American gold medalist from that day’s track and field competition. Regardless, you made the claim that the term “American” was never used, without qualification, to refer to black people prior to 1945. One or two counterexamples is enough to disprove such a claim.
> I don't think it’s awkward or uncomfortable to emphasize someone’s race.
And I do. That’s part of the disagreement that we’re working through here.
> Tell me what do you think the civil rights issues were/are about? Nah, I’ll tell you: That "american" didn't actually mean all of us on a constitutional/federal/state level and even cultural level.
I already addressed this. Repeating for clarity: I'm not saying that racism didn't exist in 1936 or that Jesse Owens was treated fairly, but there was no inhibition against referring to him, or any other black American, as an American whenever it was relevant to do so.
You made the very specific claim that the term “American” was not used to refer to black people prior to 1945. Now that I’ve demonstrated that this claim is false, you are using figurative language to retreat to the claim that black people were not historically treated equally to white people. But I have never disputed this. You are the one arguing right past me and with some imaginary figure in your head.
Furthermore, as I’ve already said, this is exactly the reason that the term “African American” became popular at one point: because it emphasized that black people were also Americans. Contrary to your false claim that it was meant as a backhanded implication that they weren’t Americans.
> The culture warrior has ended themselves.
Uncalled for and unnecessary.
That is my example for prior usage of the word "american" being biased. It was so biased that people willfully forgot the law and the constitution. Why does it not suffice?
Here is one more I recall:
“When I say all Americans — I mean all Americans...” President Truman when ending segregation in the army
I could keep looking up examples but I feel these are fundamental enough.
Yes african american emphasizes it, there was a need to do that. I wonder why?
Also I should add that I specifically dont give a damn about emoji color. I always leave default yellow cause i rarely use em anyways.
When Wal-Mart used it as their logo, was that an attempt to market toward white people specifically?
When a Japanese guy drew the first widely-used set of emoji, do you think he was doing so under the auspices of white supremacy (so strongly that he didn't even notice the “yellow = Asian” racist stereotype he was obviously participating in)?
https://www.docomo.ne.jp/info/news_release/page/20060711.htm...
Nobody is saying that yellow emoji are white supremacist propaganda.
The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. And when dark skinned people choose to use skin tone emoji for themselves it is just a bit kind of weird (just weird; not racist, not white supremacist) for white people to carry on using the yellow version.
And then it’s especially weird to continue to insist that it’s racially neutral in the face of the evidence that it really isn’t.
And really, when you're talking about perceived racial overtones of emojis, "in their perception" is what matters, isn't it? There's no objective, 2+2=4 truth that we can point to in this particular argument, as there is in some arguments, because it's all about what subtext different people are reading into things. The objective truth is that those pixels are a certain color; the perception of them is subjective, varying from person to person.
And while some people prefer to use emojis that reflect their skin tone (whether it's lighter or darker), others prefer to use the yellow emojis instead of the ones that would better reflect their skin tone. The fact that they chose that color when they had other options available suggests strongly that they are trying to communicate a "skin tone doesn't matter in the context of this communication" message.
You are arguing that the yellow color isn't inherently neutral, but I claim that you are making the perfect the enemy of the good. Even if the yellow color isn't inherently as neutral as it was intended to be, the fact that people are choosing it over colors that would more accurately reflect their skin tone means that it is neutral enough for the purpose.
When you put this much effort into saying "actually these things that don't literally resemble a white person's skin tone totally are intended to represent a white person's skin tone, because it's kinda vaguely similar; and for a long period of time you had people using the yellow to pretend to be inclusive but they really were just thinking of white people when they did it", it's hard to read that as anything other than "... and that's bad, and reflects a morally bad unconscious bias in favour of white people".
> The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are.
1. Why?
2. Why does the use of a smiley face to convey an emotion (no matter what colour it's drawn) have anything whatsoever to do with "identifying with" the face? What does it even mean to "identify with" a drawing?
A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.
> The yellow emoji is not perceived as neutral by either Black or White readers. On average, both groups perceive it as more likely to index a White identity, and we find this effect to be stronger among White readers.
Instead, someone somewhere made the call that giving up the universality of cartoon yellow emoji was worth “making some people ‘feel more represented’”, even despite the numerous other tradeoffs and nth-order effects (no reddish Native American tone, added social complexity for biracial users (“am I ‘black enough’ to use the darkest one, in a given arbitrary social context?”), and so on), which people conveniently ignore.
If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Or, if the study(s) were post-variance introduction, people came to think the supposedly-neutral colour is 'actually' white.
Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality?
I think you're onto something.
Why couldn't he? I would say the people who insist Lando must be othered in this way are the people who are being weird here, not the people who used yellow for characters whose race didn't matter to them.
Why not? Did anyone try mocking it up? His facial hair would show up fine against yellow. If the white characters were recognisable with yellow heads, why wouldn't it work for him?
https://imgur.com/a/KzlTbO2 (gpt 5 - yellow plastic)
This feels more like virtue signaling than any kind of reason: This kind of logic lets you forever find new kinds of racism that you can then make performative fights against so that you can ignore real issues that plague the world.
Take these images, how recognisable would any of the characters (those with hair) be with different hair?
https://d2j6dbq0eux0bg.cloudfront.net/images/35476104/296227...
https://75609.cdn.simplo7.net/static/75609/sku/funko-pop-fun...
If there was only one colour available, and everyone knew there was only one option, would that lead people to think it was more neutral? Did the introduction of variations also introduce the idea of non-neutrality (of yellow)?
The first "proto-minifigs" in 1975 were still relatively abstract: made of bricks, albeit special bricks. The yellow head had the same shape as now but had no facial features.
It isn't, because they know they won't be treated fairly if they do. This is why you can immerse yourself in a context where the large majority of people are white, but see brown and black skin tone emoji vastly more often than you see white skin tone emoji. And describing this reluctance to use the white emoji as "getting upset" is a part of the same memeplex that discourages them from taking part in the first place. Someone can argue that you, as a white person, are wrong no matter what you do (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-emoji-skin-tone-you-choo... — and please note how condescending and unhelpful the conclusion is, and the frankly antagonistic worldview it presents), but at least by sticking with the default you can say that you didn't put conscious effort into being wrong.
But even beyond that, the so-called "colour-blindness" is supposed to be a core liberal value, and I'm not giving it up. If I am called racist for doing what I used to be counseled to do so as not to be racist, then I am being abused.
> When a human emoji is not immediately followed by an emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as RGB #FFCC22 (one of the colors typically used for the smiley faces).
Sometimes I'm really into your suggestion of Taco Bell for lunch and want to give it a rainbow sparkle thumbs up.
Starting my online life in FIDO, with its deep and reach culture of text smiles (a hundreds of them were invented and tens of them were in wide circulation) I was personally offended by these stupid yellow circles.
What I don't like is when software/services try to be 'clever' / 'helpful' and 'translate' ASCII smileys into emojis. At this point I have to `backtick` sometimes to keep them as-is.
I thought the skin color thing is silly until I saw this vine. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9ZLq1iLCc6g
Apparently it is important to some. So I stopped complaining.
Your analysis is ahistorical.
A simple image search shows that LEGO figures were not, in fact, all yellow all the time, e.g. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/... In fact, Lando's own colour varies across editions. You might also have pointed out that they didn't make Yoda yellow, either.
More importantly: the earlier figures, when they were "yellow", were definitely more subtle shades that could more realistically represent "white people", who were overwhelmingly the original audience (since the toy was invented in Denmark, and we're talking about a period long before the modern political sensibilities around "diversity and inclusion"). It seems clear to me that there was a goal of something like realism for a long time, and that goal continues with licensed figures. Skin tones are just kinda hard to do in most artistic media.
That history also predates Unicode emoji. If anything, LEGO has settled on a specific shade of yellow for "generic" people because of the ubiquity of emoji.
> The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.
My experience strongly indicates that white people overwhelmingly "were fine being yellow", and that there are two clear reasons for it:
* They suspect that not-white people who choose a colour are trying to make a point of their not-white status for political or ideological reasons, often in a context where there's no good reason for it to matter
* They worry that if they choose the "white" skin tone that they'll be perceived as trying to make the same point about being white, and furthermore that doing so may attract strong negative attention, in the form of rhetoric about "white supremacy".
My experience also strongly indicates that both these ideas are entirely reasonable to hold. In practice, the "dark" skin tones are an option that not-white people have to draw attention to themselves (and they often choose not to); the one "light" skin tone is only every used ironically to make a political point. It's well understood that people with a specific range of skin appearance are, for historical reasons specific to one part of the world (which is not where emoji originally come from), not permitted to take "pride" (whatever that means, when referring to something you can't meaningfully change about yourself) in the fact of having that skin appearance, while everyone else is.
And of course, hardly anyone would be comfortable using emojis that deliberately misrepresent their own skin tone, except by "choosing" yellow — because yellow is seen as the default, by everyone. (Because it also structurally is, the way Unicode works, and the way that emoji-selection UIs work. People will commonly see the yellow versions as a failure or refusal to choose, rather than as a choice.)
It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:
- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases
- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)
- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers
Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?
The steelman argument would be that we have provided a way for folks who felt excluded to now feel more represented.
And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion. The latter group has suffered centuries of oppression and exclusion, often based solely on their appearance, so it's an issue that impacts them differently.
Even "The Simpsons" has introduced characters with darker complexions alongside their yellow toned cast.
Computers are powerful. We have no shortage of computer programmers. Given all the complexity in systems just to stay current and functional, a bit of extra work for emojis is a small price to pay.
>And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion.
They also represent those of thinner complexion. Overwhelmingly able-bodied too. Not to mention, it was always going to be the case since facial features are going to be dark tones and as such, it's clearer to represent them on a clear skin. This was always a nonsensical, losing game. Always has been.
I don't feel represented on the basis of branding personal expression with an identification of race as a default, the idea is frankly abhorrent to me. Why am I being excluded?
Is anyone forcing you to use a default? How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
Maybe being disgusted by others choices for casual conversation is a personal matter. Something you could address with software to disregard whatever is so offensive, or a support group, or inward reflection.
Why don't you levy this argument against yourself?
>How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
Because I cannot. By your own points, I can't express myself in a race-neutral way anymore.
>Maybe being disgusted by others choices for casual conversation is a personal matter. Something you could address with software to disregard whatever is so offensive, or a support group, or inward reflection.
This is, again, better levied against your position.
> Why don't you levy this argument against yourself?
How? I don't feel forced by others having options or even the existence of a default.
>> Maybe being disgusted by others choices...
> This is, again, better levied against your position.
I'm not the one whose disgusted or even bothered. Not even by your opinion. (I just don't share it.)
>> How are you excluded because other people can make different choices?
> Because I cannot. By your own points, I can't express myself in a race-neutral way anymore.
Thanks for clarifying. IMO you can just accept the defaults, whatever their tone/complexion, and move on. I don't think anyone is bothered by yellow being an imperfect attempt at race neutrality, so long as there are options for folks to pick whatever they're comfortable with.
The sheer length of the discussion suggests otherwise.
Debate doesn't mean people are out to get you.
I disagree that this is objective at all.
But more importantly, I disagree that the smiley face is intended to be "representative" at all in the first place.
When USENET users typed ":)", do you suppose they cared about the text being black-on-white (or white-on-black, or green-on-black, or...) when their lips are actually red and their eyes might be any number of colours? No; the entire point was that you could convey "the foregoing is intended in a lighthearted way" in two bytes, and not spend many more bytes conveying information about your appearance (which you were more likely than not deliberately trying to conceal).
If for some reason the systems I used spontaneously changed so that the smiley-face emoji had a white skin tone that happened to match my own very well, and didn't offer any options to change that, I would not for a moment register any kind of feeling of "inclusion" or "representation". I would not care in the slightest about "huh, that looks like me". If I noticed at all, I would more likely be freaked out (why does the developer of this software know what I look like?).
Just like how, in the real world where there weren't options and the skin tone was that weird dark yellow, it never once occurred to me to complain, or feel insecure, about it not looking like me; nor did it occur to me to think about whether or not it was intended to look like me, or like a generic white person, or a generic person of any other race. These were just Not Issues Taking Up Mental Space until the Fitzpatrick modifiers were added to Unicode.
Also just like how, when I used the :mrgreen: emoji on ancient phpBB message boards (actually, the Linux Mint forums allow me to do this again!), I didn't think "but nobody is actually green", or "I wonder what race of person this is intended to be 'coded' as", or "if the yellow colour is actually 'white' then this green must be... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MvsgEDKCgM".
I thought "oh, how whimsical".
And I can't come up with a mental justification for why people who aren't white should feel any differently about that sort of thing, that I could take at all seriously.
You're also continuously broadcasting your skintone and gender in the office simply by existing. Is that inappropriate and unprofessional too?
Then, imagine that after a while, that rule was found too restricting and people were allowed to wear their own clothes and do away with masks.
When people chose that, would that be considered drawing attention to their skimcolor or gender, or using their right as existing as the person that they are?
Absolutely. But let me posit a scenario that’s actually realistic.
Suppose you’re running an orchestra. People are concerned about discrimination so you implement a blind audition policy where the auditioning musician can’t actually be seen by the people evaluating their performance. Afterwards, it turns out your orchestra is still predominantly made up of white and East Asian musicians so you decide to make the blind audition optional and make a bunch of tedious statements about how the orchestra isn’t diverse enough and you want more underrepresented minorities. What’s going to happen then is that the underrepresented minorities are going to do non-blind auditions because you’ve all but promised them you’d give them preference while the white and Asian musicians will continue doing blind auditions.
If someone feels that seeing a skin colored emoji as an imposition, and is forced to make a decision that they wouldn't otherwise do because of that emojji's color, they shouldn't be doing that job.
So let me propose another example that takes place in a workplace setting where everyone has already been hired. Let’s say it’s a welding shop where the workers are issued welding helmets, welding gloves, and protective long-sleeved overshirts. All of this PPE is provided by the shop. And let’s say that for several years, the PPE is all in the same standardized color, which is yellow because that’s the primary color of the company logo. One day the welding shop decides that, rather than just wearing the yellow PPE, they’re going to issue employees color-coded PPE that approximately matches their natural skin tone if that’s what they’d prefer. Regardless of whether you think it’s a good or bad idea, you can’t deny that such a policy places a lot of significance on skin color.
Adding a skin-tone is saying there ARE differences, but any difference you can name are actually prejudices about blacks. What was meant to be a simple "ok", "agree", etc. now is charged with an "I don't think you/others and me are the same kind of humans".
That's why using skin-tones in emojis is actually racist.
It actually is. Sexual preferences also have no place in professional communication or really any non-intimate communication.
If I click a black or brown thumbs up in Slack to add my own, a white one is added.
We're a very small team and three of the skin tone choices are unique, so I often know who has reacted from the colour.
On a light background, light skin tones are bad, lacking contrast between background and skin.
Dark skin tones are bad because they lack contrast between skin tone and other details in the emoji; and if on a dark background, dark contrast.
Yellow works well on near-white and near-black backgrounds.
They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.
And they should also support the gender combining code with any other emoji, in fact, any two emojis should be combinable (if you have the combination in your font, otherwise you just display both next to each other).
I'm only like 33% joking.
That's literally what emoji kitchen is.
> They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.
Why stop there... we have 10-bit color and beyond now. Give me display-p3 (https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...)
Being over 40, I just don't give a crap about those things.
Some people customize them to more closely represent themselves. Some people use the defaults. Who … cares? … it's just an emoji.
Heck, for a while some emoji were only available in specific genders. (Those are much rarer, now.) Nobody where I work ever got hung up on the gender of an emoji not matching the user.
You mean those emojis were originally gender neutral but have now been reinterpreted. Another unnecessary division that we really don't need.
are you telling me I've been offending people?
If it is a personal slack, then have fun!
I'm a big fan of the rainbow thumbs up because I like rainbows.
Are you against headshots with actual faces as icons as well?
Emoji segregation feels off and backwards.
Please explain in what way does segregation have anything to do with emojis?
If I use black skin tones as my default emoji set even though I'm white... I imagine others will find that weird at least.
Then don’t? Why create some weird hypothetical? Just let people be who they are.
There is something weirdly dystopian about a consortium and ultimately mega corporations deciding what aspects of you are important to distinguish yourself from others, what options for those should be available or what concepts you may use to express yourself. But this is also a wider problem with emojis beyond just skin tones - the selection of foods for example is best described as what a California hipster would think of and hardly representative of what someone around the world would want to communicate.
And then there is now the problem that instead of defining building blocks for communicating concepts, Unicode now feels the need to enumerate all concepts individually. This is not just extremely limiting in what you can communicate but also horribly inefficient where with each new version fully compliant implementations need to add thousands of additional glyphs.
I suppose if Slack were open to 3P clients you could override all the tone variants to use your choice. Maybe you can make a browser extension?
This is sort of what I feel like the parent was implying without outright saying it, too. But: that's not how Slack works. If the only reaction is an emoji of skin tone A (let's say its a dark skin toned thumbs up), and I click that dark skin toned thumbs up to also react, Slack adds a thumbs up with the skin tone configured in the user's settings (which I believe defaults to no skin tone), not the skin tone of the initial reaction.
Settings → Messages & media → Default Skin Tone
May I suggest "sounds good"?
I'm glad the D forums don't allow emojis.
We announce gender and race a million ways. It's inescapable and undesirable to avoid doing. Our background and gender are relevant to our life experiences and who we are as people. That context is important when interacting with people at work or elsewhere.
Cohesive is a funny and frankly telling word to use here as well. Can you not be cohesive as a group while acknowledging that you are not all the same gender or race?
If I'm honest, this is giving "I don't mind gay people as long as it's not too in my face" vibes and I don't like it.
Very strange comment.
No, it's incredibly racist and sexist to think those things are the most important distinctions of who you are.
Here is some reading on the topic:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maiahoskin/2022/09/28/newsflash...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-b...
A great book I can recommend is "Racism without racists" by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
https://search.worldcat.org/title/Racism-without-racists-:-c...
If it's there, you might as well have some fun with it.
* https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+1F300
The original emojis were (AIUI) there to support Japanese carrier characters. They've now grown to including seemingly 'everything' for some value of everything.
What is the process for adding them? Are there examples of emojis being rejected?
The list of past proposals is here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html Most have been declined.
Perhaps too much for many HNers. But not nearly enough for anyone who's had a stalker.
But glancing at your karma - are you contributing to a platform (HN) which outlaws wrongspeak, when you should start truly living your values?
Perhaps Unicode should also include an emoji for this concept.
But yes, limited audiences. Exactly that.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
On your private site with your private client you can stuff whatever symbols you want for any particular code point I guess (§ Vendor use).
It was common in Facebook messenger, but Whatsapp doesn't have it ...
Sad, because it was quite apt in many circumstances.
I don’t think Unicode.org has a nice list of rejected proposals, but examples are easily googled, for example https://charlottebuff.com/unicode/misc/rejected-emoji-propos...
I don't see a Heart with Tip On the Right to complement Heart with Tip On the Left:
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F394
...seems like a notable oversight. And what if you were pregnant with twins? Then it seems like you'd want one big heart with two little hearts, instead of being just stuck with one big heart and one little heart.
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F495
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=heart#characters
:homer_simpson_unsure_if_joking_or_not_meme:
I feel like my (sub)language is being designed by committee. Ridiculous!
Show me a chat client/platform that can do inline SVG emojis and allow people to spread them using copy+paste and build emoji libraries, and I'll switch instantly.
Doesn’t help with “what are they trying to say?”, but does help with your “how do I say FOO?”
Or the eye roll one: https://imgur.com/FE664R2
Good times
Back then the committee was very determined not to let in more emojis – for the treasure the official response was that Unicode already had money symbols and that this should be more than enough for all use cases.
Looks like they caved in now and just adding more clobbers left and right. Half of me is happy to finally have the treasure chest, but the other half is sad, that somehow now they added it, when we could have had it 8 years ago!
(I think they should have unified Latin/Greek/Cyrillic, too, with variation selectors to disambiguate the overlaps. Yes, including special cases like the Greek question mark and Cyrillic multiocular O.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Unicode
One thing I feared might happen and do seem to be happening is, Chinese LLMs and AI projects seem to be moving towards Chinese-English bilingual models away from regular omni-lingual models, which, I think is, because LLMs would become confused with Chinese-invalid syntaxes and dictionary definitions, and/or generally perform worse, if substantial non-Chinese CJKV data was included in the dataset.
At the polar opposite of computing, Hollow Knight: Sliksong released just days prior is having Han Unification font problem as well: as you might know, thanks to Han Unification, CJKV languages each require its own font, of which no two cannot be active at the same time, and characters become mangled if application developer spends substantial cost implementing such non-standard feature. The developers was not aware of that, and did not spend extra cost doing so, and is getting review bombed in China.
It just needs to be reversed. It's a real problem. Adding more obscure characters and obscure features is tangential and not a solution. Different isolated clusters of characters uses need to be separated, not overlapped into one same area, like there are no "GermanFrench-English dictionary".
And I'm saying this as a CJKV person and past gamedev: CJKV languages each require its own font no matter whether the Han unification is implemented or not. There are simply too many glyphs there; not just unified characters, but also common characters that are not considered unified are also often varying across countries. If you account for all those glyph variations in a single font, you just can't cope up because OpenType only supports at most 65,536 glyphs in a single typeface. In the alternative universe OpenType may have been extended to allow more glyphs in a single typeface, I don't know, but CJKV characters are simply complex enough to require multiple font files in general. Han unification is of less concern when you have too many glyphs.
That's the unification, the issues stemming from CJKVs each not having own code points. The issue is not that CJKVs need multiple font files and it's cumbersome, the issue is that no two CJKV fonts may be loaded at the same time because there are conflicting glyphs. Conflicting glyphs. That's just wrong.
There is a single circumstance where this is not generally doable: a user name in globally serviced online games. (Guess why I know of this case...) Unless there is a hint that a particular user prefers one's user name to be displayed in a certain way, it is difficult to decide which font to use (or even which set of fonts to use). But it's a very niche problem and otherwise you know which language of the text you are showing and can pick the correct font from your assets.
You should not need to keep or infer the language hint. I know it was always the officially sanctioned way and what developer engaged in i18n work has to live with. My point is NOT that you are wrong but that part of Unicode spec is wrong.
But there is a single Latin alphabet
So? Unicode isn't in either of the extremes, so it didn't unify Latin and Greek (using language tags to differentiate), but then it also didn't separate German and French, so your GermanFrench dictionary still falls flat, it's doesn't help in picking the dividing line
* https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45187274
There are some charts with the new characters available at:
* https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-17.0/
"CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J" has 4298 entries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?
I don't understand why we need to add small images into character set. Hieroglyphs for those who can't read?
People also have been adding smileys to their communication as early as the 1700s.
Corporations like Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook invent them. And pay tens of thousands a year for Unicode consortium so that they can vote to add them to the standard.
They are corporate symbols.
The recent additions come from a variety of proposals; most seem to be independent initiatives.
Big tech embraced emoji, but they got in the standard without them. Their widespread use was pretty much a given.
But overall, I don't think something is bad just because it's corporate. Do you think this is a bad influence of some sorts?
> agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want
So? Should we stop adding emojis just because the potential is infinite?
> And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic?
Add a combining prefix/suffix and you wouldn't need to do encode every single char from those alphabets. But also the general answer exists: whatever is commonly useful.
Which is a pointless nitpick given those two cardinalities are the same.
I am saddened that in 2025 she still fails to render in a lot of contexts.
(ZWJ sequence combining Person in Steamy Room, Dark Skin Tone, Zero Width Joiner and Female Sign.)
edit: and now I see Slack can finally render her correctly - :woman_in_steamy_room::skin-tone-6:
I take it all back then. Slack can do it correctly now
For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).
We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.
Just pointless madness.
And where does one stop in adding pictures?
When I text my Japanese friends, we tend to use a lot of emoji and (in-app) stickers. I think emoji have such a hold in Japan because 1. there's a big "cute" culture there, and 2. Japanese language is largely icon-based (logographic) already.
When I see emoji all over Reddit comments, Github READMEs, and code docs, I feel a frustrating culture mismatch. I'm glad HN strips them. But, there are situations where I use emoji and like them a lot.
Original purpose: simple/clear way to convey an emotional context to text
Current result: "What the heck is does face even mean?" or "Let's use these symbols as the basic for unintelligible slang."
(Bonus extra issue: Different implementations with subtly different images that imply a slightly different emotional context)
More often than not, I tend to default to basic old text emoticons, as it more clearly expresses the intent.
The big thing is that historically those features were ignored due to being low demand, the desirability of emoji made emoji great vessels for getting those features implemented and tested by engines.
I think creating fonts is what’s gotten a lot more intensive, fallback fonts are a thing but the integration between different fonts is not always enjoyable.
I suppose I should welcome any good news in tech at this rate, though.
The soldiers in my country don't wear camo uniforms, and even to us it would be clear.
Maybe I’m just showing my northern bias?
Northern bias, yes. What about emoji or Unicode is tied to the weather? Why not use more universal time markers? If dates or months are truly too precise for this timeline, quarters are good enough. They could also just have a month range or "approx".
Being near the equator (whether northern side or southern), I don't have an innate sense of seasons at all, so have to remember what people are referring to when they use these terms.
> As a recent example, Kurdistan (a subdivision of Iraq) became an official subdivision in ISO 3166-2 (IQ-KR) on May 3, 2021. The corresponding Unicode subdivision code (iqkr) is slated for release in CLDR v41 on Apr 6, 2022. At that point the flag for Kurdistan will officially be valid — any platform, app, or font could support it. But that doesn’t mean it automatically gets in the queue for everyone’s phone. Only countries with ISO 3166-1 region codes are automatically recommended and require no proposal to move forward.
https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag...
Personally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3
More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.
I’ve done a bit of climbing, and I guess I’m just struggling to imagine using it… rocks falling is either not a big enough deal to text about (cause we’re all following safety guidelines by wearing helmets, right?), or way too big of a deal to make light of with an emoji. The latter case applies even more so in cases where the rocks hit buildings.
The only situations I can imagine are a) “im gonna be late, the road is blocked by rockfall” and b) “couldn’t go skiing this weekend, an avalanche closed the slope”. But maybe two is enough! And who knows, maybe it’ll be interpreted as “collapse” in general, which is broadly useful obviously.
After all, Sasquatch live near many rock climbing destinations. https://www.bfro.net/GDB/state_listing.asp
Otherwise can't you just write :emoticon:
I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.
At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.
We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.
I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.
Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.
This would be like deleting kanji, and would also require perfect surveillance of everyone's devices.
If you want Chat Control you don't have to hide behind weird recommendations about emoji
Them being defined is only a benefit to me if I do happen to need to use them, say to copy-paste Sanskrit to translate it, or if I want to make a joke about bigfoot with an emoji punchline.
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
A handful of emojis, fine. Pictures are not language.
We don't need a bunch of new pictures to "support the world's writing systems" (their own words).
Can we do that now please to finally kill UTF-16.
