Is there any significance to people using emojis that match their skin tone?

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 😝 !!

lovely_reader , (edited )

This came up in an anti-racism group I belonged to many years ago, where I learned to try to be aware of my acceptance of whiteness as "default" or somehow raceless. I also learned not to jump in and center myself in conversations about how race is (or worse, should be) perceived by those negatively affected or sensitive to it—or at least I thought I learned that, but here I am about to press send.

I came away from that conversation with an understanding that while I may feel that my race is immaterial to my identity and my point of view, it is nonetheless a real component of the context of my attitudes and online presence, so it's valuable to ask if there's a reason I'd want to hide it.

qaz ,

What do you mean with autistic text stim?

grandkaiser ,

It's some tiktok cringe thing about autism being a quirky and fun trait instead of a challenging mental disorder.

HottieAutie OP ,

I was feeling a bit uncomfortable with asking about this topic because I was worried that I would inadvertently be offensive somehow, so I typed my actual verbal stim into the post. Making weird noises when I'm overwhelmed is a way for me to get the energy out sometimes.

Texas_Hangover ,

This is my favorite emoji 🖕🏻

Etterra ,

I dunno, I mean they do it with LEGO men now, but Simpsons or LEGO yellow skin only belongs on people so jaundiced that it's a miracle they're not dead. Same with the more feminine Lego women. What ever happened to that same stupid smile and just switch the hair piece? I mean if it makes you happy I guess, it ain't hurting nobody. I feel neither represented nor unrepresented by a cartoon yellow face. Maybe it's just because I'm white, I dunno. You do you I guess.

Anticorp ,

I have a white friend that uses the dark brown emojis, which I'm kind of uncomfortable with. I think he thinks he's showing solidarity. To me it seems like blackfishing. I haven't put any more thought into it though, as it is a pretty minor thing in a world with much more important things to be concerned with.

Cryophilia ,

blackfishing

Oh god please not another buzzword

Stop before you wake the tabloids

AlphaOmega ,

All my emojis have jaundice

deafboy ,
@deafboy@lemmy.world avatar

Emoji is a failed concept anyway, because what you send is not necessary what the recipient gets. Why the app developers don't get this, is one of the great mysteries of our century.

But when I do use them, I choose the yellow ones.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

I would agree that emoji have basically failed. They confuse communication rather than facilitate it.

Why are there 😀 and 😃 ? "Grinning face" and "Grinning face with big eyes." Why? There are so many of them with subtle details like this that A. choosing between them is a bigger chore than it should be and B. they have to be rendered at such a high DPI that "bro just increase your font size" becomes the bullshit workaround everyone tells you to do. I can read the English text just fine, but on most screens emoji are indistinct blobs.

Emoji are subject to all the variation that fonts are. You know how there are two lowercase "g" glyphs? There's the one you probably do when handwriting which is an O and a J, and then there's the loop over a loop that basically no one hand writes, it looks like the font Lemmy uses has that g. Well, emoji are like that. Like how they had to add "male dancer/female dancer" the the standard because Google rendered the "dancer" emoji as a lame disco man, Apple rendered it as a woman in a red dress.

They don't get used the way we used to use emoticons. I don't see people say things like "I can't go to the park today ☹️ " I see people say "Hey guys 👬 I just got back from the store 🏪 with some groceries 🥫 and took a picture 📸 of my dog 🐕 " Which to me demonstrates a failure to grow past the Sesame Street book with 6 thick rigid pages reading level.

Finally, there are so many symbols that have alternate meanings that you just have to know. Like you can send white or tan or brown faces, but all eggplants are purple and all peaches are pink.

Maalus ,

And yet eggplant and peach are obvious enough.

Ballistic_86 ,

It’s about personal preference for sure. I tried to start using the “white” emojis and it just didn’t seem to matter. If I do use an emoji, I tend to default to the Simpsons yellow because it requires no extra effort. I don’t see a ton of people using the skin-tone emojis at all. I also have no issue with people using them much like pronouns in emails/profiles.

I’m also on iPhone so if I am going to extra mile I’ll just use my little sticker guy who better represents me in general.

Mastengwe ,

If they’re over the age of 16, there’s no significance to anyone that uses emojis.

Alsjemenou ,

👆🤣

rockandsock ,

Most white people expect peach color/white to be the universally accepted default and everyone should just not think about it because they themselves rarely have to think about representation.

White people in majority white countries rarely experience lack of representation so they don't think its a big deal.

If medium brown was the default lots of people would be losing their minds with rage and y'all know it.

angrystego ,

The emoji standard is bright yellow though, not peach or white.

meekah ,
@meekah@lemmy.world avatar

That's not the point of the comment, and not even what they said

rockandsock ,

Universally accepted default for drawn or animated people in general, not emojis.
Simpsons yellow is what they use for white people.

angrystego ,

Are there any non-Simpsons yellow animated people?

rockandsock ,

Honestly not sure. I don't watch a whole lot of animation these days.

lovely_reader ,

On The Simpsons? Yeah, there are Black and brown characters.

angrystego ,

Nono, I mean in other animated series.

MonkderDritte ,

What white. Default is yellow.

rockandsock ,

White/peach is the universally accepted default for drawn or animated people in general, not emojis. Simpsons yellow is what they use for white people. It's still using white person color for the default.

MonkderDritte ,

And a dog is a wolf.

jiberish ,

Isn’t it weird that only the white people in The Simpsons are yellow? There’s other races that aren’t yellow. And the Simpson’s world mirrors the real word; a large number of yellow people migrated from Eastern Europe to settle in Springfield.

I guess it’s better than the Doug universe, with people being either Caucasian or blue or purple. Very weird choice of representation, Nickelodeon! 👀

scutiger ,

Matt Groening said he made the characters in the Simpsons yellow with oddly colored hair so that people would be confused by the colors and try to adjust the knobs on their TVs to fix it only to never get it quite right.

Thorny_Insight ,

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.

dependencyinjection ,

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.

Thorny_Insight ,

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.

EatATaco ,

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.

SpaceCadet ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

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.

Image

algorithmae ,

Maybe you'd feel differently if your country wasn't 90+% homogeneous with a light skin tone

Thorny_Insight ,

There are no yellow skinned people where I live

algorithmae ,

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.

Thorny_Insight ,

I quess we need a billion more variations of those emojis then. Lets keep paying more attention to the skin color of people. That seems like a great idea.

algorithmae ,

Yeah you don't get it and never will, that's a shame

Thorny_Insight ,

Ad hominem is not an argument to the contrary

algorithmae ,

No, but having a blindfold on doesn't suddenly make it okay to punch someone

Paradachshund ,

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.

scutiger ,

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.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

Does the skin tone modifier work on the peach emoji?

TheBest ,
@TheBest@midwest.social avatar

fuck legit laughed out loud at this

dhork ,

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.

BombOmOm ,

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.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

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.

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