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.
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Is there a significance to using skin-tone emojis, and if so, what is it?
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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 😝 !!
The Simpsons came out in 88. You are saying most of the world got the Simpsons about half a decade later. I would say this proves the exact opposite of your point and that it is a huge world cultural phenomena. I’m shocked that I’m having the defend the Simpsons as one of the most important and impactful TV shows of all time.
My point is, I didn’t even hear about the Simpsons until I was in Uni, which puts it around 1995-ish, but I sure knew what a yellow smiley was.
Emoticon != emoji. Characters don’t have skin tone colors. The first emojis didn’t come out until 1999
I meant smileys really, because that’s what they were initially called. Emojis is a more recent retroactive rebranding/appropriation of smileys by Apple when they launched the iphone.
Anyway ICQ had yellow smiley faces 1996-ish. AIM had them 1997-ish. Yahoo!Pager, later Yahoo!Messenger, had yellow smileys in 1998. And MSN definitely had them in 1999.
And then there’s friggin minesweeper that had a yellow smiley face all the way back in 1992:
I guess they all watched too much Simpsons?
I believe emoji was a Japanese creation, not a Apple creation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
My reference to the Simpsons has nothing to do with claiming this is where yellow emojis came from. My reference to the Simpsons is to point out that yellow skin tone is clearly adjacent to whiteness and this was well established before emojis caught widespread support in the mid/late aughts.
The fact that others also used yellow emojis financially successfully does not contradict the claim that it’s clearly adjacent to whiteness. If anything, it reinforces the claim.
yellow skin tone is clearly adjacent to whiteness and this was well established before aughts.
Not it was not and it still isn’t. The reason we think of the Simpsons as white is because the context makes it crystal clear that they’re a typical white suburban family, not because of their color. If Matt Groening had made Simpsons green, purple or blue we’d still think of them as white, and at the same time smileys and later emojis would still be yellow. At best there is some parallel evolution here in the sense that both Matt Groening and Harvey Ball both chose yellow for the same reason: because it is perceived as a bright happy color.
If you then associate yellowness exclusively with whiteness that’s purely a you thing, and honestly I find it pretty fucked up to see racial connotations like this in the most innocent things. Stop projecting your own prejudices.
emojis caught widespread support in the mid/late aughts
My argument is that bright yellow smileys have their own cultural lineage dating back to 1963, and it has nothing to do with skin color or race. Using these yellow smileys to express emotion in computer programs has been a thing since at least the mid nineties, not the mid/late aughts as you claim. The reason that it only appeared in the mid nineties and not earlier is technological and cultural. It has to do with the developing graphical and networking capabilities of computers around that time, and because smileys were popular in other aspects of culture around the same time. It has nothing to do with The Simpsons or other supposedly white cartoon characters.
Not it was not and it still isn’t.
It is. Everyone, if they are being honest, knows that Springfield is mostly white. Everyone knows that when a famous white person makes a cameo, and is white, they are yellow and no one is confused as to who it is, or if they are trying to make some racially ambiguous version of that famous person. It’s not just me: everyone gets it.
The reason we think of the Simpsons as white is because the context makes it crystal clear that they’re a typical white suburban family, not because of their color.
If they had given them brown skin, but changed nothing else, would you still be saying it’s “crystal clear that they’re a typical white suburban family”? Of course not. Let’s not be absurd here. Obviously the choice of skin color plays a role in that interpretation.
If you then associate yellowness exclusively with whiteness that’s purely a you thing,
The funny thing is, I didn’t. It was never a thought that cross my mind. You know why? Because I’m white and it represents me. It wasn’t until I saw people start using the non-white ones that I started to realize my privilege in emojis. It wasn’t until I had a discussion about race and the Simpsons yellow did I realize how white that yellow actually is.
My argument is that bright yellow smileys have their own cultural lineage dating back to 1963
Yeah, but at no point have you established that this this history is non-white, or that the success wasn’t the result of being white-adjacent. You just say that because they choose yellow for non-racial reasons, well then yellow can’t be seen as white. But there is a logical leap here. I’ll just come back to my point that their success might even have to do with being white-adjacent.
