Tomorrow's Emoji Today: Unicode 17.0

Perhaps Unicode should also include an emoji for this concept.

A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.

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?

BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.

Because in the current ((zeitgeist)) Europeans are not allowed to have a racial identity.

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.

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.