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 😝 !!
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.
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.
Which is the same reason they make characters of different races, genders and sexualities in video games.
And people complain about these things “being forced on them” obviously without realizing that all those minorities are typically not represented in media. It’s such a minor thing that should be easy to ignore if it doesn’t apply to you, but when it does apply, feels good to know that someone was thinking about representing someone like you.
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.
That, and I think they trace a direct lineage back to the original Harvey Ross Ball smiley face, which was also yellow.
Me, I don’t particularly care about matching emoji skintones to myself. Rather, I’m much more annoyed that I can’t tune the 🏍️ emoji to match the color of my motorcycle. What a rip off.
…since they already represented everyone.
Did they really? Because if that were the case we wouldn’t have different skin tones for emojis with people claiming they feel more represented by them or happy to use them because they have the same skin tone.
Yes, they did. The Canadian flag represents all Canadians. The BC province flag may represent me more closely, but it doesn’t stop the Canada flag from doing the same. While some people will be happy they can represent themselves more accurately to real life, it also makes for more exclusive use cases. I think there’s an argument to be made for keeping things simple and broadly usable.
There’s no significance because they are just fucking emojis.
Simpsons yellow
:D
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
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 feel this is like saying the Simpsons, and most of Springfield, aren’t supposed to be white because their skin is yellow.
It’s no surprise the default emoji color is so close to white skin, and it’s no surprise that some people feel a lack of representation by this.
But emoji’s are not derived from the Simpsons. They’re derived from the yellow smiley face ideogram that originated in the 1960s, it was designed by the artist Harvey Ball.
It’s yellow, not because it’s supposed to represent whiteness, but because the company colors of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company it was designed for were yellow and black, and because it feels sunny, bright and positive. It’s an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun, and does not represent a human with a specific skin color.
I neither said nor implied they were.
My point is that everyone, who is being honest at least, interprets the Simpsons as being white. Do you think they’re white?
Groeing chose yellow because it jumps out, but the characters are all supposed to be white. He could have chosen other colors that pop as well, but settled on yellow, for white people.
As I said, it’s no surprise the default emoji is closest to white skin. Even if that association comes from the Simpsons, emojis didn’t come out until decades after the Simpsons became a cultural mainstay.
interestingly, according to one study im half-remembering, people from countries with an ethnic majority see the Simpsons as part of their ethnicity. ie Asian people perceive The Simpsons as Asian.
Why would someone want to add gendered pronouns to a language
For adding specificity to lamguage. If you are talking about several people, the disambiguation can be handy.
We could have add pronouns that distinguish by size, or age, etc.
The really stupid feature of most indo-european is the arbitrary gendering of most nouns.
I really don’t care what colours of emojis exist. Use them or don’t use them, it’s not that deep.
Actually spending time thinking about coloured emojis is a little strange to me. If someone wants to use a black one, white one, or yellow one just let it be.
You sound like the kind of people that would have proclaimed it’s idiotic to give women rights, or let them vote, or give LGBTQ+ people rights of marriage or whatever. Change is inevitable and just because something has no bearing on your life doesn’t mean it has no bearing on anybodies life.
You sound like the kind of people that would have proclaimed it’s idiotic to give women rights, or let them vote, or give LGBTQ+ people rights of marriage or whatever.
You’re insane.
