If a person took the extra effort to send me the white thumb emoji instead of the yellow one I would assume very mean things about them
"Time for your discussion about which emoji thumbs white people should use to solve racism!"
Reparations pls
We have to be careful with the way we speak if we don't want to alienate people. So: Will we deny reparations to black and brown people, or will we deny them to people of color?
We will give reparations to BIPOC, but only in the form of an IMF loan, with 200% interest rate
Liberal media has literally folded into making the parody articles that Alt Righters would write about them 5 years ago. Every serious ideologue has either doubled down on their worst traits or crossed over to the actual left
As an Asian person, am I supposed to use the yellow emoji or the white emoji if that's closer to my actual skin tone?
Please help me crowdfund to get an answer from America's foremost emoji raceologists.
If you have calipers on hand, could you take the normal measurements of your skull and send them to me? I'll get back to you within 3-7 business days on which emoji is most applicable. Please include $20 dollars in vbucks as payment.
I don’t have an answer for you, but I am offering a position at the Democracy Institute for Equality and Business Think Tank
I've never seen anyone use anything but 👍
This feels like an attempt by Big Emoji to get people to actually use the other ones
Not like us here, with our prodigious amounts of quality, original emoji
Some of my poc friends use the brown ones. I wouldn't give them a hard time about it. But speaking as someone who is white passing using the white skin emojis would be too weird
i always make mine brown some of my friends do, most dont. yellow makes me feel like a Simpsons character. no one cares.
Just seems like an extra step for emoji I already barely use to be honest. Occasionally use like 👍🏽 or smth, but I mostly just hit the default simpsons one. In any case it's a very weird thing to police
I don’t see why it’s weird lol. The entire point of the skin tone update was to give people more customization for basic, cartoon expressions. I would be more weirded out by people if they told me they felt weird about using their skin tone cause they’re too white
Since you're going around saying "I don't get it". The thing here is that it's a drop down menu, I guess. If white was the menu default, then that's what white people would use, but yellow in an emoticon context is already coded as white (despite the broader cultural context where it's East Asian), so going out of your way to pick a more explicitly white tone is weird. You say that the purpose is for "expression" and then deny that it expresses anything. My question is why would someone feel the need to express more explicitly that they are white?
This doesn't matter, but if you showed me a lengthy text message and asked me about a specific use of "can't" over "cannot", I could probably give you an assessment of something like that as well if you really wanted one. No one here thinks this is an important issue, but they are attempting to articulate an opinion in response to the particular claim made.
my mom is brown, and uses the brown ones, but the brown one is way darker than she is and so it just seems kinda off. It's like, mom, your skin tone is Halle Berry, not Grace Jones
(i'd never tell her that tho)
This is radlib quibbling through and through, but I want to add a refutation anyway:
There was discussion before on this site about how nominally white people shouldn't identify with whiteness. Isn't this an example of that, however trivial? Unless I'm a racist, why would I ever want to go out of my way to further identify myself with whiteness? I won't deny that my experience is one of being white and in fact want to be transparent about it, but that's not the same as wanting to append "as a honky" to every statement I make. That's White Pride shit (i.e. shit)
I feel like it will always be a catch 22 with no right answers on an individual level until racism has been dealt with structurally. As a white person, you cannot be ethically pure in the world as it is, even though obviously something like this is really trivial
As a white person
In all seriousness, how do I tell if I'm white? I keep thinking about another user's example of Assad. He appears white-passing, but his name, religion and nationality would each be enough for him to be considered non-white in the US.
And is a case like that one where it actually matters to what extent the person identifies with whiteness?
It's funny. Most of my great grandparents wouldn't have been considered "white" in their early years in America, yet here I am, undisputably white. White Hispanics are another one that feels kind of nebulous. I also saw a clip of an Irish comedian saying he visited America and he doesn't have white guilt because in Ireland "we planted the potatoes, and then dug them up ourselves"
In conclusion, whiteness is bullshit and needs to be destroyed.
Then there's the Irish who left for America because there weren't any potatoes to pull up (not edible ones, anyway), were discriminated against but eventually their descendants were accepted into the white hegemony, and nowadays benefit from American white privilege.
That'd be me, and I definitely have white guilt and will not by using the white power emoji.
Plus I'm a huge Simpsons fan 👍
Yeah, I'm not saying it's a perfect retort but I think in this case it's pretty clear that snow roaches using the yellow emojis is better.
I swear. If people talked to me about this shit IRL I would suspect them of being a federal agent more than someone talking about blowing things up
Frr seriously, that take feels like a surefire way to create dozens of separate interpretations and a thousand confused, circular arguments between them. Instead of just having people admit the obvious, they'd rather we go the long way and alienate each other unintentionally. Not good for much else.
I think its one of those liminal things, sorry for using that word. You shouldnt identify as white because its not a thing but theres no going around the fact that your skin is white and the rest of the world perceives you as white.
I feel like I mostly buy into this but I also don't believe in the radlib sense of endless guilt, wokescolding and apologizing for it.
You should use the white skin emoji is written by someone who works from home and never leaves the house. All their interactions are through social media.
Like, there should be spheres of communication and they dont all overlap with eachother. The shit you say to your IRL friends doesnt make it out to your public Instagram page because you cant make the same type of qualitative and quantitative social agreements on the broad internet space that you can with your IRL friends.
I use an Android with gboard so I only use giant combo emojis. If you aren't using these you need to be. It's the one thing Google has done right in like 20 years.
This is the kind of shit you think about when you don't give a shit about capital literally destroying the Earth in real time
Why does my emoji have to match my real body? I type :) all the time but I can confirm my eyes are not two dots and my smile does not stretch around them like that..
I’ve never felt the need to go into my settings to change my skin color. I wouldn’t even know where to find the setting.
Extremely telling that you don't even know where the setting is (it's in "Themes" btw). Your privilege is showing
Lol, I thought you were riffing and talking about literally being able to change the color of your skin
On iOS, you just long press on the emoji you want to change the skin color of.
It's obviously going to vary based on your OS.
I did think about this a few years ago and opted for 👍. I feel a little weird when I see the white reacts used by others. This is not so much of a problem anymore but Slack/etc used to not stack the reacts, so if everyone was thumbs-upping you'd have a bunch of different ones instead of just one count and it made voting with 👍👎 more difficult. If nonwhite comrades tell me they prefer the white ones I'll switch but I suspect nobody gives a shit.
I'm honestly a little suspicious of anyone who uses the white 👍. I feel like the only people who care enough to explicitly use it instead of the yellow are either virtue signalling liberals or white supremacists. I'm probably reading far, far too much into people's emoji choices though.
That is absolutely the vibe I get from white skin emojis. It is almost always a performative liberal or a barely cloaked fascist
I find any non-default emoji colour weird. Like why do you feel the need to tell me your skin colour?
I’m genuinely baffled by these kinds of responses lol. Did I miss a big event where liberals were using white emojis or something? The first thing I think about when I see 👏🏻 is “this person is either white or have white skin” and move on with my life
It depends on the context a lot. Someone using a white thumbs up might just be white, but they are announcing that they are white. This could mean absolutely nothing, but in certain online spaces, it can be a white supremacist dogwhistle. It's really dumb that we have to look out for it at all, but they love appropriating any symbol they can.
In my case, the only person I know IRL and regularly uses white emojis is the deeply brainwormed type that believes white men are marginalized by society. He also uses the really pale one even if his actual skin tone is at least one shade darker, which is another can of brainworms.
I'm white, but I'm also fairly confident no one gives a shit. The Simpsons colored one isn't to be "raceless." It's just the default. It's for anyone (not just white people) who don't care to broadcast their race to people or just can't be bothered changing it. This article is a solution looking for a problem.
Asian here. If a white guy came to me and gave me some 20 minute analysis on why white emojis are racist so that’s why he doesn’t use them, I will assume he’s a trust fund neoliberal and advocates for genocide in third world countries. I am not kidding. Take that as you will
That would be excessive, but everything we do sends a message so it's reasonable to consider how the message might be interpreted. What do you think when you see a yellow emoji without a 20 minute unprompted analysis?
I think “great, this person uses emojis so now I have to as well or else they’ll think I’m abnormal.”
yeah it does that now but didn't when they first released the skin color emoji. They added grouping in 2021