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by JamisonM 1861 days ago
"racializing all facets of everyday life, including emojis"

Every representation of humans is racialized, they exist in a social context where race exists.

Pretending that it is not and then complaining when someone says, "hey, we maybe should make it so not everything looks like white folks" is just silly stuff. Emoji diversity is good and 100% harmless!!

1 comments

> Every representation of humans is racialized, they exist in a social context where race exists

This is only true as long as we go out of our way to make it true. The concept of “googly eyes” for example, is totally race agnostic. Likewise, emojis represent emotions that don’t inherently need to be coupled to race. Emojis aren’t even a new concept, we had emoticons in the ‘00s in AIM, where 99% of the emotions had nothing to do with race.

I say this as a brown man; it really doesn’t matter to me if the “thumbs up” I use in a coworker’s merge request is brown or the default yellow. On the flip side, emoji diversity is yet another reminder that I’m different from others, especially in a context where I would rather focus on what makes us the same.

Then you use the yellow one, problem solved.