The default “simpson’s yellow” was also Lego group’s go-to choice for minifigs, all the way up to 2003. At which point, it had minifigures depicting Lando Calrission and various NBA players, and suddenly yellow was not sufficient.
Crayola has gone though a similar evolution with its colors, exchanging “flesh” for “peach” in 1962, and eventually releasing its “colors of the world” collection just this year.
Emoji are like crayons and Lego bricks in that they help condense and simplify a shorthand language about the larger world. It’s to be expected that if the larger world is racist as hell, the first order simplification of that world is also going to be racist.
I don’t know that it’s possible-or even a good idea- to try to simplify the unraveling of that larger world. Entropy only flows in one direction.
But miltiracial emoji adds to the vocabulary, just as brown minifigs and 24 crayon colors of skin… so I am for it.
I never understood why people thought we needed skin colors to replace yellow emojis. And reading the discussion, I’m still convinced it was a waste of time and only helped to create even more tension than before.
I think the real key is that the use of pictographic communication modes introduces elements not necessarily intended, that are open to mis-interpretation.
While emoji are “kewl”, their predecessor emoticons, based on simple combinations of punctuation marks conveyed no such information.
The use of emoticons, in turn, came about because conveyance of tonal information that had previously been accomplished by having better vocabulary was too difficult for… Some people. Let’s let it go there.
Bottom line… Maybe iconographic communication modes may NOT be one of our better ideas.
Oh wait… All the , ya know words, are of European origin. So language as we know it is inherently racist.
As a white person, this is not an issue I usually want to discuss, because I know I discuss it from a position of privilege. Furthermore, as an european person, where racism is defined along different lines - because racism exist (and ooooh sooo much racism. If anyone tells you “my country isn’t racist” they’re either lying or oblivious), but the struggles that POC face in america are very idiosyncratic, and as such, many of the reactions america has towards mitigating racism are too, very difficult to fully appreciate from an outside perspective.
Representation matters, but giving the emoji skintones for me feels a lot like saying “girls use computers too” and then someone releasing PINK computers for girls, instead of shifting the advertising to be more inclusive and less genderist. It’s a solution that hasn’t solved anything, instead shifting the discourse to a new complexity it feels utterly alien for most people outside USA.
What’s worse, it’s adding more “complexity” (of the bad sort) to a medium that already has a lot of flaws (given that we derive a lot of nuances out of non-verbal cues, text communication is ripe for misunderstandings due to the lack of those cues).
So, It’s not I don’t understand you think is a good thing. It’s just that I don’t see the added cost has a good enough benefit.
I will at least admit that may be out of selfish desire to have them simple and neutral, and so it is maybe good I’m in the minority here.
A good thing would be if we could stop the cycle of systemic and individual racism and people’s passive acceptance of it, as “no big deal,” or “that’s just the way it is.”
I think there would be much to be learned by a comparison of european racism contrasted with USian racism. Even comparing US northern racism with the southern version, yeilds a lot of insight.
…but um… yup. Derailment is a thing. Look, I’m doing it now!
There’s no real difference, except that Southerners tend to be more upfront and less passive-aggressive about their hatred. It’s just another head of the same exact hydra.
There’s a lot of opportunity for potential racial misunderstanding (or, maybe, tail swallowing) of the variety discussed in this presentation even if you use these guys though! I often use them in SMS conversations (because I’m of that vintage). They’re white on a blue (or green, depending on my correspondent’s phone OS of choice) background in my messages as displayed on my screen, but black on a white background (as they are on the bbs page) in my message on my correspondent’s screen.
Well, you know, from a white person’s perspective, traditionally yellow colouring has never equalled White, it’s equalled Asian! If some people now seek to see Yellow = White people, because The Simpson’s, then there’s really no hope, because no matter what people use, someone will always make a big deal about it, and demand an apology for being offended, probably on behalf of other people who, most likely, come up short on the number of fucks they couldn’t give.
