Racially diverse emoji are a nice idea. But will anyone use them?
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Version 0 of 1. Emoji has often been called a modern hieroglyphics, a pictorial language with evolving rules. Creators of this language have recently expanded and fine-tuned the number of symbols we have for concepts like “me” and “you”: now, Apple users can choose from more racially diverse emoji ... and yet we’ll probably shy away from actually using them. Thanks to the latest software update, people who have iPhones can choose from a menu of different skin color options for their emoji. Gone are the default-Caucasian “painting nails” and “princess” and “flexing arm” icons; now, the symbols default to yellow, but you can also choose from five different skin tones. It’s a whole new world of racial representation which nobody is actually utilizing. I hate the defaults. Their skin is yellow, which is OK – they’re meant to mimic the classic round smiley face. But these emoji are more realistic cartoons, with hair, and the hair is also yellow and weirdly shiny, as if molded from plastic. They resemble Playmobil figures with a Lego color scheme. I’ve heard that yellow makes you anxious and looking into the black eyes of these jaundiced plastic golems I’m inclined to believe it. I still use them every time, though, because I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to do. Presumably I’m meant to be choosing my own skin color – but it just seems so declarative to opt for a white emoji, as though I were worried people might forget for a minute that I am white. It’s not like there’s really a person face that looks like me anyway; skin and hair tones are very limited, and the blonde hair (closest to my color) is paired with tan skin (not close to my color at all). Choosing brown, though, seems even more fraught – at worst appropriative, at best symbolically weighted. I imagine my interlocutor trying to parse the choice as though it’s significant and all the possible misunderstandings if they do. Much better to be a yellow ghost. Almost all the non-white friends I asked said that they went with the default yellow emoji too. (The exception was Ijeoma Oluo, who wanted a brown default: “I want brown faces normalized on the internet, even if it’s weird emoji faces. I want nothing but brown faces. It’s our turn. People will still recognize your smiley face, trust me.” I’m already on record as supporting this plan.) The reasons differed. Pilot: “I’m lazy”. Jade: “I only ever use the bald ones. In my heart of hearts I’m just a boring bald yellow ball”. Sulagna: “I’m not sure if any of them even look like me”. Are emoji even supposed to represent your skin color? With the white-default emoji, nobody assumed that a brown-skinned person using a pinkish thumbs-up sign was somehow trying to represent herself as white; that’s partly because of our deep cultural conviction that pinkish skin is neutral and only brown skin is racially marked, but it might also be partly because the thumbs-up emoji means “OK”, not “Here’s my thumb.” If the emoji aren’t supposed to represent individual users, though, who do they represent? People in general? In this case, should they be aiming over time for a color frequency that represents the racial makeup of the world? This seems a little work-intensive for a text. Are they supposed to represent the person you’re talking to? Pilot wasn’t into that idea: “It would be weird if a white friend texted me a black hand waving because, why did they go out of their way?” One thing is clear: expanding the emoji menu isn’t going to do a damn thing about racism. Potentially, it makes things worse. “Five options, 10 options: it doesn’t really make a difference. It is just as easy to come up with 10 or a 100 stereotypes as it is 5”, Lisa Nakamura, a prominent scholar of technology and race, told me. “Racism preceded emojis, video games and the whatever other new technology comes down the pike tomorrow or the day after. I would say that emojis do not make it easy to talk about race online, they make it harder because now it seems like it’s about aesthetics and not about politics.” Emoji may not make it easier to talk about race, but they do make it easier to represent race – in theory. In practice, though, it appears that while everyone wanted an emoji dictionary with shades of brown, nobody actually goes out of their way to select them. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe the best thing skin-toned emoji can do for us is sit quietly in our menus, making the default yellow raceless by omission. Maybe those unused options finally give us a true neutral, instead of yet another situation where white skin is just assumed. I just wish that neutral option weren’t yellow. Bleh. |