I’m asking because as a light-skinned male, I always use the standard Simpsons yellow. I don’t really see other light-skinned people using an emoji that matches their skin tone, but often do see people of color use them. Maybe white people don’t naturally realize a need to be explicit with emoji skin-tone or perhaps it’s seen as implicitly identifying or requesting white privilege.
-
Is there a significance to using skin-tone emojis, and if so, what is it?
-
Assuming there might be a racial movement attached to the first question, how does my use of emojis, both Simpsons yellow and light-skin, interact with or contribute to that?
Note: I am an autistic white Latino-American cis-gendered man that aims to be socially just.
Autistic text stim: blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 !!
Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned. It’s a nice contrasting color to show the emotion and they have always done a good job representing everyone while serving their goal: to convey emotion in text.
The push for representation in emoji’s always struck me as weird since they already represented everyone. I rarely see people using them who aren’t a bit too focused on skin color in their day-to-day life.
I can give you a real answer, because I asked my wife this exact question (she’s black and uses the skin tone closest to hers, I’m white and also just use yellow ones). She said it’s so rare to get to choose a digital representation that matches her skin tone that she just thinks it’s fun to get to do it for once.
The yellow should be the only one. I find it absolutely idiotic that they needed to include all different skin colors. I think that’s similar to my native language (Finnish) not having gender specific pronouns (hän = he/she) and then someone wanting to come up with ones. That’s “fixing” a problem that didn’t even exist in the first place.
Maybe you’d feel differently if your country wasn’t 90+% homogeneous with a light skin tone
There are no yellow skinned people where I live
It’s still pretty light if we’re considering the array of skin tones that are throughout humanity. If you weren’t Finnish, but instead African or Indian or South American for example, maybe you wouldn’t feel that yellow was representative of you and your people. Saying yellow is fine for everyone because you feel it’s fine isn’t taking into account the other billions of opinions in the world.
I quess we need a billion more variations of those emojis then. Lets keep paying more attention to the skin color of people. That seems like a great idea.
Use what you want to. Let others use what they want to. Don’t overthink it.
Some people are thrilled with the fact that they can make their little online avatar closer to their reality, others don’t give a damn, because they don’t want to define themselves by their virtual presence. At the end of the day, though, they’re just pixels. What you say and how you treat people is much more important than whatever little +1 icon gets attached.
