[jrmg]

I am white. I kept mine yellow for a long time.

Then I noticed that most of the non-white people I knew were changing them - and actively celebrating when new skin-color variants were added.

I realized that by keeping mine white I was not being ‘color-blind’, I was, at least to some, saying something like ‘I’m happy with the default because I think it adequately represents me’. Perhaps I did feel that, to be honest!

On top of that, I could even be seen as passive-aggressively saying ‘your choice to use the skin colored emoji is unimportant and/or wrong’, which is certainly not what I felt at all!

The whole Simpsons argument (emojis weren’t created in a vacuum - the Simpsons came first and there the ‘default’ yellow is obviously representing ‘white’) was in my mind a little when considering all this.

I use the second-lightest white ones now.

[slily]

In other words you succumbed to peer pressure from a crowd that is obsessed with identity labels.

I see people of all shades use tones. To me it just says "btw I'm <race>". I can't help but think "who cares" in the back of my mind. I don't think yellow icons "represent me" either, I'm not self-inserting into The Simpsons.

At the risk of being overly dramatic for a discussion about emoji, I think that dismissing the concept of "color-blindness" in favor of "race consciousness" and other assorted identity politics, which led to hyper-focus on superficial characteristics like skin color, has done more to foster racism than anything else in the last few decades.

[jameshart]

The Simpsons features non-yellow characters. Yellow characters are white.

Lego actually is a stronger precedent for ‘yellow is what color you make a person when you don’t mean to identify race’. Once they started adding movie character minifigs they introduced white skin as well.

But the journey there also gives the lie to ‘yellow minifigs we’re never coded white’. The very first Star Wars Lego sets shipped with yellow minifigs for characters like Luke, Leia and Han. It was only once they started to think about shipping characters like Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu that they realized ‘wait a minute, we’re never going to get away with a yellow Lando’.

(And actually around the same time they were also dealing with releasing NBA player minifigs.. the decisionmaking at Lego must have been pretty complicated at the time)

[jrmg]

In other words you succumbed to peer pressure from a crowd that is obsessed with identity labels.

That’s not what I consider myself to have done. My non-white friends and colleagues are not, in my experience, ‘obsessed with identity labels’. They were just choosing an emoji that looked a little more like them, and a little less like the ‘default’ [that did _not_ look like them, but arguably did look like me] when representing themselves.

This is all in contexts where I knew who I was communicating with, btw (Slack, text messages etc.). In anonymous settings I might think differently.

In a ‘color-blind’ world perhaps it would not really matter to you what color people’s emojis were, just like in real life?

As a bit of a meta-comment, I suggest that if you want to convince others of your beliefs you might want to present them with a little more humbleness and kindness apparent in your words. Your first two paragraphs are quite confrontationally phrased.