
Why White People Don’t Use White Emoji - dustinmoris
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/white-people-dont-use-white-emoji/481695/
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seniorsassycat
The Unicode consortium was careful not to add race modifiers. There is no
white skin and no black skin modifier, the modifiers are based on Fitzpatrick
scale, described by tanning and burning.

I'm white, but I have type 3 or 4 skin, I always tan but I might burn if I
don't wear sunscreen on the first weeks of spring. Type three was the most
used modifier in the articles data.

In addition to Aditya Mukerjee's quote about the yellow emoji including white
people, I think the 1-2 emoji is to light for most white people.

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esotericn
I don't use white emoji because it's a weird irrelevance for a thumbs up, in
the same way that a standard smiley emoji is genderless.

I would have thought that would explain it for the most part.

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mikestew
Here’s my crazy crackpot theory, based partly on my own reasoning for not
immediately changing from _Simpsons Yellow_ to _Midwestern White Boy_ : the
defaults for life in general have always catered to whitey (never once did my
sisters have to ask why there’s no white Barbie), and yellow is a close enough
default that the white person doesn’t bother to look up how to change it. In
the U. S., at least, we went a long time trying to pretend people of color
didn’t exist, so when new options come, the person of color says, “hell,
yeah!”

I didn’t change it for a long time because it comes up in the middle of trying
to fire off a quick text, do it later. Finally changed it because of some
misfired mental need for consistency, not to “represent”.

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zimpenfish
Another issue might be that some of them don't have the alternate colours (at
least on iOS) - none of the emoji faces do and neither does "shaking hands"
inexplicably - people may try to set the colour on a face, it doesn't work,
they assume it just doesn't work for any of them, etc.

Apparently these are the ones with alternates: [https://emojipedia.org/emoji-
modifier-fitzpatrick-type-1-2/](https://emojipedia.org/emoji-modifier-
fitzpatrick-type-1-2/)

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mcphage
I don't see why you need shame to explain the disparity. Some people felt that
the default yellow still implied whiteness (like it does for the Simpsons), so
they added skin tone modifiers. The fact that white people don't feel the need
to change to explicit whiteness—but feel represented by the yellow—fully
supports the reason that they were added in the first place.

If white people _did_ use them just as often, wouldn't that imply that the
association between yellow skin and whiteness wasn't there?

So all this article supports is that adding them turned out to be the right
decision after all.

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btschaegg
> The fact that white people don't feel the need to change to explicit
> whiteness—but feel represented by the yellow

Having no data at all (it would be interesting how you would even study this
properly), but I still wanted to add this: It's not that the yellow emojis
make me feel "represented" by being yellow. It's just that I don't care. If I
want to express that I'm amused/angry/sad, it's the face that counts, so I see
no point in fiddling with it just so it appears in some other shade of color.

You could still wonder about the causes of this, of course. I'd guess that
having the same skin tone as a big majority of people where I live, I never
had to concern myself with any societal differences in the sense that I was
affected by them. Also, it never got to be that big a part of my identity,
since I'm "like everyone else" in that regard.

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mcphage
> It's not that the yellow emojis make me feel "represented" by being yellow.
> It's just that I don't care.

You look at the yellow, and you don't think "that's not me". So you don't mind
using it.

POCs looked at the yellow, and _did_ think "that's not me". So color modifiers
were added. The fact that the darker skin tone modifiers are being used more
heavily than the lighter skin tone modifiers makes me think that adding them
was the right decision.

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nickthegreek
iPhone user here. Article seems to focus on just hand the hand face emoji and
not the upper body emoji's.

On the hand emoji's, I use the slight tanned white skin. For the upper body
emoji, I normally use the white skinned/brown hair emoji as it reflects more
than my than just skin tone. When it comes to Christmas, I only use black
santa.

The article seems to undermine the headline though. They found 19% used the
lightest skintone, and 30% used the second lightest.... that's 49% of their
sampled tweets.. They also didn't do any work to find the race of those
sampled in the tweets.

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nieve
Exactly - the average for the darkest three tones is 17% and for the lightest
two 24%, that's a huge bias in the opposite direction of the author's
conclusion. I'm not sure if he deliberately mischaracterized the data for
click-bait purposes or he's incompetent at arithmetic, but his data completely
disproves his claims.

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dvfjsdhgfv
Hint: disable JS when visiting theatlantic.com, the website becomes more
usable then. (This applies to most other informative websites btw)

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stunt
Skin tone emojis are double-edged sword. Not sure if it was a good idea! Same
thing is happening to gender now!

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krapp
People can use these features, or not, it's their choice. It's a positive for
people who happen to want to use them, but what's the negative?

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stunt
> It's a positive for people who happen to want to use them

Yes, that's true. But, I saw similar articles and discussions many times! That
simply means it did introduce some friction which looks very unnecessarily. I
don't remember seeing any discussion against yellow emojis or feeling the
necessity before skin tones.

Nevertheless, having these discussions is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps
all of it is the result of not talking about it.

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koosnel
I am White and I use White emojis with pride. If that upsets anyone they can
just deal with it.

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krapp
No one cares.

~~~
koosnel
You care enough to reply.

