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 😝 !!

  • blusterydayve26@midwest.socialEnglish
    195·
    22 days ago

    The original emojis were white before the yellow and darker tones were added in 2015. Look up Katrina Parrott for the backstory. In short, before yellow was the default, White was the only option, and that’s kinda racist, and was only 9 years ago.

    Yellow was simply a neutral addition to emojis that matched well with the existing yellow smiley face (which that French asshole keeps charging people for).

    Thanks for questioning your assumptions. Further reading if you’re interested:

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/katrina-parrott-skin-tone-emojis-patent-office-warren

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parrot+skin+tone+emoji+&t=ffip&ia=web

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      211·
      22 days ago

      Emojis evolved from the smileys we had in the late 90s, which were mostly yellow, but could be in various colours, like red for the angry face. Those smileys evolved from the text versions like these :) or :D

    • loomi@lemmy.world
      6·
      22 days ago

      Also the first gen iPhone emoji were a Japanese add on pack, iirc a keyboard addition. I had to install this add on on my iphone3g while I lived in Japan. Those emoji had average Japanese skin which white people just assumed was white. Only after those optional emoji got popular did apple make it standard, android copied, then people got worried about range of skin tone seeing as the Unicode was a global standard.

      • blusterydayve26@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        22 days ago

        Thank you, I had no idea the first phone emoji characters were a third party add-on. That explains how they got there, since Apple is pretty notorious for not including people shaped things in their art.

    • loomi@lemmy.world
      82·
      22 days ago

      Historically the original emojis were ascii so the symbol had the color of text on the electronic device where typed

      :-)

      ¯(ツ)/¯

      :(

      And so on

        • loomi@lemmy.world
          5·
          22 days ago

          Same same

          emoji became a thing because the Japanese wanted pictures aka kanji style representation of the ascii expressions. In any regards OG skin tone was average Japanese