I read an article which stated that by Apple introducing the colorized emoji, they actually increased racism. The author said that people feel awkward not using the different skin tones since they’re there, but by doing so they expose their race, which opens them up to racist attacks and makes them stand out of the group. I’d argue that it’s just exposing the racism that was already inherent in the community, but I didn’t write the article.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. It could reduce racism by making people of color more visible. Most racists aren’t inherently pro-white, rather they’re picking some arbitrary criteria for us vs. the others. As a result, making it visible to them that their ‘us’ is lots of people of color, they’ll drop that nonsense criteria pretty quickly.
But of course, chicken-egg and all that, people experiencing racism may not necessarily want to expose their race for the reasons you named, and so they don’t become collectively visible.
I read an article which stated that by Apple introducing the colorized emoji, they actually increased racism. The author said that people feel awkward not using the different skin tones since they’re there, but by doing so they expose their race, which opens them up to racist attacks and makes them stand out of the group. I’d argue that it’s just exposing the racism that was already inherent in the community, but I didn’t write the article.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. It could reduce racism by making people of color more visible. Most racists aren’t inherently pro-white, rather they’re picking some arbitrary criteria for us vs. the others. As a result, making it visible to them that their ‘us’ is lots of people of color, they’ll drop that nonsense criteria pretty quickly.
But of course, chicken-egg and all that, people experiencing racism may not necessarily want to expose their race for the reasons you named, and so they don’t become collectively visible.
NGL, I’ve witnessed and experienced this phenomenon and I think we should go back to stick figures for emojis.
Just use a different race emoji everytime doesn’t have to match you
That’s extra work for no reason, when the orange-yellow one is default.
But then people would start being accused of racial appropriation