[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.