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 😝 !!

  • algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    5 months ago

    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@lemm.ee
      21·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • sparkle@lemm.eeCymraeg
        0·
        5 months ago

        Something people living in almost entirely racially homogenous countries don’t often get is that you can’t help the problem of racism by trying to ignore it. The only way to correctly address racism is to realize that it exists, that people do have biases based on race & ethnicity, that there are groups that are underrepresented, and to actively work to provide more ways for people to represent themselves and their identity.

        Acting “colorblind” just makes the problem of racism worse, as it means you’d be acting blind to obvious biases based on race… including people who are part of a certain in-group (or multiple in-groups) being overrepresented, or people of an out-group being underrepresented or represented poorly/highly stereotypically… there is no morally just approach to discrimination which attempts to pay no attention to the trait being discriminated against.

        It’s pride month, this is like literally one of the most relevant times of year to this… It shouldn’t be a problem that people who have different skin tones have slightly more variants of emojis to express themselves with.