What an incredibly stupid article. And this is not exactly a short piece. Seriously, the crap the West frets about in today's world. Talk about unserious.

NPR...your tax dollars at work.



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Which skin color emoji should you use? The answer can be more complex than you think

Heath Racela identifies as three-quarters white and one-quarter Filipino. When texting, he chooses a yellow emoji instead of a skin tone option, because he feels it doesn't represent any specific ethnicity or color.

He doesn't want people to view his texts in a particular way. He wants to go with what he sees as the neutral option and focus on the message.

"I present as very pale, very light skinned. And if I use the white emoji, I feel like I'm betraying the part of myself that's Filipino," Racela, of Littleton, Mass., said. "But if I use a darker color emoji, which maybe more closely matches what I see when I look at my whole family, it's not what the world sees, and people tend to judge that."

In 2015, five skin tone options became available for hand gesture emojis, in addition to the default Simpsons-like yellow. Choosing one can be a simple texting shortcut for some, but for others it opens a complex conversation about race and identity.

"I use the brown one that matches me," said Sarai Cole, an opera singer in Germany. "I have some friends who use the brown ones, too, but they are not brown themselves. This confuses me."

Cole is originally from California and identifies as Black and an American Descendant of Slavery. She said that while she was not offended when a non-brown friend used a dark emoji, she would like to understand why.

"I think it would be nice if it is their default, but if they're just using it with me or other brown people, I would want to look into that deeper and know why they're doing that," she said.

Jennifer Epperson, from Houston, identifies as Black and said she changed her approach depending on who she was talking to.

"I use the default emoji, the yellow-toned one for professional settings, and then I use the dark brown emoji for friends and family," she said. "I just don't have the emotional capacity to unpack race relations in the professional setting."

Is the yellow emoji really neutral?
A 2018 study published by the University of Edinburgh looked at the use of different skin tone emojis — what it referred to as "modified" emojis — on Twitter to find out if the modifiers contributed to self-representation.

Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google and Ph.D. candidate involved in the study, said the emoji modifiers were used widely but it was people with darker skin who used them in higher proportions, and more often.

After another look at Twitter data, Andrew McGill, then writer for The Atlantic, found that some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don't want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text, or to take advantage of something that was created to represent diversity.

Perhaps, like Heath Racela, they simply don't want to think about how their message could be interpreted.

But Zara Rahman, a researcher and writer in Berlin, argues that the skin tone emojis make white people confront their race as people of color often have to do. For example, she shared Sarai Cole's confusion when someone who is white uses a brown emoji, so she asked some friends about it.

"One friend who is white told me that it was because he felt that white people were overrepresented in the space that he was using the emoji, so he wanted to kind of try and even the playing field," Rahman said. "For me, it does signal a kind of a lack of awareness of your white privilege in many ways."

Rahman, who in 2018 wrote the article for the Daily Dot, "The problem with emoji skin tones that no one talks about," also challenges the view that the yellow emoji — similar to the characters from The Simpsons — is neutral, because on that show, "there were yellow people, and there were brown people and there were Black people."

She said there was a default in society to associate whiteness with being raceless, and the emojis gave white people an option to make their race explicit.

"I completely hear some people are just exhausted [from] having to do that. Many people of color have to do that every day and are confronted with race every day," Rahman said. "But for many white people, they've been able to ignore it, whether that's subconsciously or consciously, their whole lives."

Rahman admits there's no specific answer to all the questions about emoji use but said it was an opportunity to think about how people want to represent their identities.

"I think it's more one of those places where we just have to think about who we are and how we want to represent our identities," she said. "And maybe it does change depending on the season; depending on the context."

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/09...oji-skin-tone-colors

I'll admit I didn't read this entire article, but I do get a kick out of people who feel the need to change the color of their emojis to more accurately depict their skin color. It's a friggin emoji for crying out loud. Leave it default yellow and we'll all be the same! More evidence of division if you care to look at it that way.

if'n they wus ceryous bout the kolur of dey moji, dey be not seein dem moji's all gots da same hairkuts.

Emoji is a Japanese word, and the first set of Emoji characters was created by a Japanese company. They were much more popular in East Asia than the US until less than a decade ago.

Earlier iPhones did not have Emoji's available by default, you had to enable the emoji keyboard and switch between keyboards to use them.

Since they originated in east Asia, they are yellow, and you know...

But then the famous 70's smiley face was yellow too.

How hard is it to connect the dots? Apparently too difficult for the author.

NPR is a den of communist swine and villainy.

RMD

NPR wasn't half bad for a while. I used to listen to it in the car, on the way to and from work, daily. Did it often have liberal bias? Yes, it did. But you could apply a bit of compensating "belief bias."

Hell, the local affiliates actually carried Ted Nugent's show for several years.

They were a damn sight better than anything on the commercial broadcasts, that's for damn sure. For several years I even donated, annually, to the one of the local affiliates.

Then... I want to say it was around or shortly before the Sandy Hook school shooting incident, they went full retard. One day, getting ready to get out of my car at my gym, I could take it no longer. Turned it off and that was that.

A month or two ago I tried listening again. That lasted all of five minutes. That's as long as it took to tell they were worse than ever.

I remember seeing a comedy skit about emojis. The black guy was complaining about having to use a bowling ball to represent himself. He made light of the whole affair.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
I remember seeing a comedy skit about emojis. The black guy was complaining about having to use a bowling ball to represent himself. He made light of the whole affair.

One black comedian said he loved bowling because the black ball dominates the skinny white pins with the red necks. Billiards was racist because the white ball dominates all the other colors and you win by sinking the black ball. It was funny and in good humor.

I’m all for OG Yellow. Mostly because my life isn’t tied up in making mountains out of mole hills.

Wow, you can have different color emojis? Who knew?

I look for the green ones, but those racist bastages who design the emojis just want to hold us green Martians down.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their emoji but by the content of their text message.”

quote:

Originally posted by Pale Horse:

they will not be judged by the color of their emoji but by the content of their text message

Jesus. Every last thing has to be racial. And triggering to some people.

To solve this apple and android etc could just make them all rediculous colors like green, blue or purple. And get rid o every shade of actual human skin tones. Unless your that guy that ate all the colloidal silver and turned blue as a smurf. He’d probably be happy.

quote:

just make them all rediculous colors like green

Ain't nothing wrong with green!

I use what I want to use regardless of what the virtue signaling, pearl clutching, bigots think.

If it is on NPR then it is about race.

quote:

he felt that white people were overrepresented in the space that he was using the emoji, so he wanted to kind of try and even the playing field