I’m asking because as a light-skinned male, I always use the standard Simpsons yellow. I don’t really see other light-skinned people using an emoji that matches their skin tone, but often do see people of color use them. Maybe white people don’t naturally realize a need to be explicit with emoji skin-tone or perhaps it’s seen as implicitly identifying or requesting white privilege.

  • Is there a significance to using skin-tone emojis, and if so, what is it?

  • Assuming there might be a racial movement attached to the first question, how does my use of emojis, both Simpsons yellow and light-skin, interact with or contribute to that?

Note: I am an autistic white Latino-American cis-gendered man that aims to be socially just.

Autistic text stim: blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 blekh 😝 !!

  • dhork@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Use what you want to. Let others use what they want to. Don’t overthink it.

    Some people are thrilled with the fact that they can make their little online avatar closer to their reality, others don’t give a damn, because they don’t want to define themselves by their virtual presence. At the end of the day, though, they’re just pixels. What you say and how you treat people is much more important than whatever little +1 icon gets attached.

  • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    I can give you a real answer, because I asked my wife this exact question (she’s black and uses the skin tone closest to hers, I’m white and also just use yellow ones). She said it’s so rare to get to choose a digital representation that matches her skin tone that she just thinks it’s fun to get to do it for once.

    • scutiger@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Which is the same reason they make characters of different races, genders and sexualities in video games.

      And people complain about these things “being forced on them” obviously without realizing that all those minorities are typically not represented in media. It’s such a minor thing that should be easy to ignore if it doesn’t apply to you, but when it does apply, feels good to know that someone was thinking about representing someone like you.

    • HottieAutie@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      5 months ago

      She said it’s so rare to get to choose a digital representation that matches her skin tone that she just thinks it’s fun to get to do it for once.

      awww, that sounds so cute

  • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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    Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned. It’s a nice contrasting color to show the emotion and they have always done a good job representing everyone while serving their goal: to convey emotion in text.

    The push for representation in emoji’s always struck me as weird since they already represented everyone. I rarely see people using them who aren’t a bit too focused on skin color in their day-to-day life.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That, and I think they trace a direct lineage back to the original Harvey Ross Ball smiley face, which was also yellow.

      Me, I don’t particularly care about matching emoji skintones to myself. Rather, I’m much more annoyed that I can’t tune the 🏍️ emoji to match the color of my motorcycle. What a rip off.

      • LilDumpy@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I don’t feel represented. There isn’t a badass chrome and black cruiser emoji that makes a loud-ass rumble when you open the message, so I’m stuck with the fast and quiet Supersport 🏍.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned.

      I use those ones because they’re closer to the top of the list, therefore faster to scroll to when I’m choosing an emoji.

    • Tywèle [she|her]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      …since they already represented everyone.

      Did they really? Because if that were the case we wouldn’t have different skin tones for emojis with people claiming they feel more represented by them or happy to use them because they have the same skin tone.

      • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        Yes, they did. The Canadian flag represents all Canadians. The BC province flag may represent me more closely, but it doesn’t stop the Canada flag from doing the same. While some people will be happy they can represent themselves more accurately to real life, it also makes for more exclusive use cases. I think there’s an argument to be made for keeping things simple and broadly usable.

  • Blizzard@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    There’s no significance because they are just fucking emojis.

    Simpsons yellow

    :D

  • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I kinda like using emoji that are similar to my skintone. Not really making a statement, but somehow it feels a little more “me.” Hard to explain why it matters, it’s not like I won’t use the yellow ones if that’s all they have. Just kinda like “hehe, that’s a lil me in that message.”

  • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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    My immediate opinion upon skin tone emoji being introduced was the mildest frustration: we’d had unified emoji for all Homo sapiens!

    Then after seeing someone use their own skin tone for an emoji, I realized… oh, dang. They can feel represented now, potentially in a way they did not before.

    I use yellow 100%. But not bad folks have options.

    One neat thing is on Slack you may be able to see a hint of your company’s vibrant diversity if folks are reacting with all colors of emoji. Admittedly it could also look a little cluttered though maybe they are grouping reactions by symbol now.


    On a related note, I’ve seen two people with very light (though non-white) skin tones use significantly darker skin tone emoji. One of those times I brought it up with someone else and they’re like “yeah what’s with that?!” Self image or eyesight related perhaps…

  • Hjalmar@feddit.nu
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    5 months ago

    I just use the yellow one as I feel like they already represent everyone. I would definitely not feel any better about using a white emoji, I’d just feel like a racist trying to convince people that I’m better. I also like the yellow ones as it makes the standard to be anonymous about your skin colour. Or you could just use the outlined one for everything 🫥. Also the hole emoji is awesome 🕳️

    And that was a way longer ramble then I intended 😀

    And finally, good by 🖐️🖐🏻🖐🏼🖐🏽🖐🏾🖐🏿

    P.S. Typing them all out the yellow one is also by far the most readeble. The white ones work very good on the black background I’m viewing this on but they probably just blend in to the background if your using a light theme. Maybe we should just type out all the variants? 🤷🤷🏻🤷🏼🤷🏽🤷🏾🤷🏿🤷‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏿‍♀️🤷‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏼‍♂️🤷🏽‍♂️🤷🏾‍♂️🤷🏿‍♂️

    • Noodle07@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I’m a guy and default to use the female 🤷most of the time because that’s what my phone gives me on some apps

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        cishet male, I use yellow for face emojis and yellow gender neutral people for physical language standins.

        I want to represent the mood, not myself.

        • Noodle07@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Exactly! I guess I grew up with MSN so I’m used to having few emojis with specific mood rather trying to match myself

  • jiberish@lemmy.world
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    Isn’t it weird that only the white people in The Simpsons are yellow? There’s other races that aren’t yellow. And the Simpson’s world mirrors the real word; a large number of yellow people migrated from Eastern Europe to settle in Springfield.

    I guess it’s better than the Doug universe, with people being either Caucasian or blue or purple. Very weird choice of representation, Nickelodeon! 👀

    • scutiger@lemmy.world
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      Matt Groening said he made the characters in the Simpsons yellow with oddly colored hair so that people would be confused by the colors and try to adjust the knobs on their TVs to fix it only to never get it quite right.

  • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@midwest.social
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    5 months ago

    There’s at least two things going on here:

    A) a very mild case of the “white as default” part of white privilege. White people see themselves as default and use the default emoji.

    2] the (often accurate) perception that white people who highlight their race unnecessarily do so out of racial pride, making self-use of a “white” emoji suspect.

    I’m not saying these are the only two things at play, just the ones that occurr to me on first examinstion.

    • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Ugh. What a load of horse shit. 1) People are lazy, 2) often don’t realize that they /can/ change them, 3) care to.

      • OlPatchy2Eyes@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Then what is your explanation for black and brown people more likely to use the skin toned emojis, as has been mentioned so much in this thread? Are they less lazy than white people, or care more about it? If they care more about it, then why?

  • OlPatchy2Eyes@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    White dude here. I use the white skin emojis, but honestly I think it’s just because I see my black and brown friends use their skin tones as a rule, and I feel like using the yellow tone is a bit weird when others are using the skin tone customization.

    I’m not ashamed of my skin color or anything and the phone remembers my last tone selection so I don’t really see a reason to not use it.

  • deafboy@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Emoji is a failed concept anyway, because what you send is not necessary what the recipient gets. Why the app developers don’t get this, is one of the great mysteries of our century.

    But when I do use them, I choose the yellow ones.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      I would agree that emoji have basically failed. They confuse communication rather than facilitate it.

      Why are there 😀 and 😃 ? “Grinning face” and “Grinning face with big eyes.” Why? There are so many of them with subtle details like this that A. choosing between them is a bigger chore than it should be and B. they have to be rendered at such a high DPI that “bro just increase your font size” becomes the bullshit workaround everyone tells you to do. I can read the English text just fine, but on most screens emoji are indistinct blobs.

      Emoji are subject to all the variation that fonts are. You know how there are two lowercase “g” glyphs? There’s the one you probably do when handwriting which is an O and a J, and then there’s the loop over a loop that basically no one hand writes, it looks like the font Lemmy uses has that g. Well, emoji are like that. Like how they had to add “male dancer/female dancer” the the standard because Google rendered the “dancer” emoji as a lame disco man, Apple rendered it as a woman in a red dress.

      They don’t get used the way we used to use emoticons. I don’t see people say things like "I can’t go to the park today ☹️ " I see people say "Hey guys 👬 I just got back from the store 🏪 with some groceries 🥫 and took a picture 📸 of my dog 🐕 " Which to me demonstrates a failure to grow past the Sesame Street book with 6 thick rigid pages reading level.

      Finally, there are so many symbols that have alternate meanings that you just have to know. Like you can send white or tan or brown faces, but all eggplants are purple and all peaches are pink.

  • blusterydayve26@midwest.social
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    5 months ago

    The original emojis were white before the yellow and darker tones were added in 2015. Look up Katrina Parrott for the backstory. In short, before yellow was the default, White was the only option, and that’s kinda racist, and was only 9 years ago.

    Yellow was simply a neutral addition to emojis that matched well with the existing yellow smiley face (which that French asshole keeps charging people for).

    Thanks for questioning your assumptions. Further reading if you’re interested:

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/katrina-parrott-skin-tone-emojis-patent-office-warren

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=parrot+skin+tone+emoji+&t=ffip&ia=web

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      Emojis evolved from the smileys we had in the late 90s, which were mostly yellow, but could be in various colours, like red for the angry face. Those smileys evolved from the text versions like these :) or :D

    • loomi@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Historically the original emojis were ascii so the symbol had the color of text on the electronic device where typed

      :-)

      ¯(ツ)

      :(

      And so on

      • lorty
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        5 months ago

        Those were called emoticons back in the day.

        • loomi@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Same same

          emoji became a thing because the Japanese wanted pictures aka kanji style representation of the ascii expressions. In any regards OG skin tone was average Japanese

    • loomi@lemmy.world
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      Also the first gen iPhone emoji were a Japanese add on pack, iirc a keyboard addition. I had to install this add on on my iphone3g while I lived in Japan. Those emoji had average Japanese skin which white people just assumed was white. Only after those optional emoji got popular did apple make it standard, android copied, then people got worried about range of skin tone seeing as the Unicode was a global standard.

      • blusterydayve26@midwest.social
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        Thank you, I had no idea the first phone emoji characters were a third party add-on. That explains how they got there, since Apple is pretty notorious for not including people shaped things in their art.

  • normalexit@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I leave mine stock yellow, but it is kind of a cool thing when you see a bunch of different color emojis liking a post. Feels nice and diverse lol.