[chimeracoder]

> How so? If you're white, perhaps you see no problem with making everyone's skin white.

> But the billions of people who aren't white might have a problem with it.

I'm not white, and I have a problem with "skin tone" emoji.

Previously, skin tones for emoji were left up to the font creator. In practice, this meant that they were usually lime green, neon blue, or Simpsons yellow, all of which are cartoonish enough not to be evocative of any particular real-life skintone.

I can't really imagine a situation in which drawing attention to the race of an emoji character is desirable or even acceptable. I'm sure some exist, but they're nowhere near important enough to be included in the actual standard itself.

Beyond that, the skin tones used are incredibly reductive. Human skin tones are not as simple as 6 different shades of brown. (I, for one, cannot match my skin tone to any of the examples on the Unicode website). And if we want to get philosophical, there are a number of ways in which race and culture are encoded (literally) into emoji that are far more subtle, yet more significant, than the color used to render the skin of the faces. In a way, it reminds me of the picture-interpretation tests that they used to administer at Ellis Island to "prove" that certain immigrants were not "fit" for life in the US, though that's perhaps a topic for another day.

[dragonwriter]

> Previously, skin tones for emoji were left up to the font creator. In practice, this meant that they were usually lime green, neon blue, or Simpsons yellow, all of which are cartoonish enough not to be evocative of any particular real-life skintone.

That's not true, IME -- in several of the popular emoji fonts I've seen that don't incorporate specific "skin tone emoji", most emoji for people that aren't expressly silhouettes are white, except a very small number which are black (in both cases, within the range of flesh tones usually associated with those as races, not cartoonish colors.)

EDIT: This is not true of "smiley face" emoji, but of other emoji representing humans or human body parts.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> Beyond that, the skin tones used are incredibly reductive. Human skin tones are not as simple as 6 different shades of brown.

Yes, they are a bit more complicated. But 6 choices that correspond to a widely-used system (Fitzpatrick) is far better than none.

[chimeracoder]

> correspond to a widely-used system (Fitzpatrick)

The fact that a system is widely used when classifying the impact of UV light on melanoma does not imply that it has relevance in another.

> 6 choices is far better than none.

Actually, no, sometimes the "solution" is worse than the problem. It's quite regressive to bake an outdated conception of the color theory of race into a standard that aims to "educate and engage academic and scientific communities, and the general public" (the stated mission of the Unicode Consortium).

As one of the "billions of people who aren't white" that you refer to in your original comment, I find this approach more problematic than the existing status quo (leaving it up to the font creators).

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> The fact that a system is widely used when classifying the impact of UV light on melanoma does not imply that it has relevance in another.

You may have a point there. But it is a classification of skin colour as well.

> It's quite regressive to bake an outdated conception of the color theory of race into a standard

Color theory of race? This isn't the Von Luschan chromatic scale, that was used to enforce racial segregation. It's a simple colour selector based on level of melanin.

It's not perfect, sure, but I think it's surely better to allow a choice of skin shades than to make everyone white (the de facto result otherwise). You might object that implementers could make everyone black, say, and that's also true. But either way, you're enforcing a "default" skin colour, and there is no such thing. Different human populations have different skin colours.

[ssalazar]

> I can't really imagine a situation in which drawing attention to the race of an emoji character is desirable or even acceptable.

Nobody said anything about race, thats your assumption. These emoji are merely presenting different skin tones.