The clowns are out here trying to claim that emojis are racist again.
🤣🤣🤣
Look at the headline:
Wired's "spiritual advice columnist" is going to tell you little racist people how to send smiley faces on your phone!
The article starts with a question from a reader who wants to do religious penance for her white guilt (I'm assuming it's a woman, yes):
I'M A WHITE person, and despite there being a range of skin tones available for emoji these days, I still just choose the original Simpsons-esque yellow. Is this insensitive to people of color?
Answer:
Other acceptable-but-less-sensitive answers might include:
- "Were you dropped on your head as a baby?"
- "Seek professional mental help."
- "Are you in a cult?"
Instead, the woke "spiritual advice" columnist goes with, "Yes, you're actually a racist, you racist racist!"
While it might seem intuitive to choose the skin tone that most resembles your own, some white users worry that calling attention to their race by texting a pale high five (or worse, a raised fist) might be construed as celebrating or flaunting it.
Ah, yes. There's nothing more vile than a "pale" man raising his fist in celebration or giving out high fives.
The writer Andrew McGill noted in a 2016 Atlantic article that many white people he spoke to feared that the white emoji "felt uncomfortably close to displaying ‘white pride,' with all the baggage of intolerance that carries."
Oh, okay! So basically white people are barred from using white emojis, but people with more melanin in their skin have none of the same restrictions. Cool.
So I guess white people should just use black and brown emojis, then?
Darker skin tones are a more obviously egregious choice for white users and are generally interpreted as grossly appropriative or, at best, misguided attempts at allyship.
Ah.
Okay, so white people should basically adopt the "non-human" yellow skin tone because they are vile scum without a people group or ethnicity, right?
That leaves yellow, the Esperanto of emoji skin tones, which seems to offer an all-purpose or neutral form of pictographic expression, one that does not require an acknowledgment of race — or, for that matter, embodiment. (Unicode calls it a "nonhuman" skin tone.)
Alright, problem solved!
(Sorry to any Asians that personally identified with the yellow skin tone... you are apparently not human.)
The existence of a default skin tone unavoidably calls to mind the thorny notion of race neutrality that crops up in so many objections to affirmative action or, to cite a more relevant example, in the long-standing use of "flesh-colored" and "nude" as synonyms for pinkish skin tones. The yellow emoji feels almost like claiming, "I don't see race," that dubious shibboleth of post-racial politics, in which the ostensible desire to transcend racism often conceals a more insidious desire to avoid having to contend with its burdens. Complicating all this is the fact that the default yellow is indelibly linked to The Simpsons, which used that tone solely for Caucasian characters..
Okay, so white people can't use white-toned emojis, black-toned emojis, or yellow-toned emojis.
Yellow emojis were also created and "propagated by the largely middle- and upper-class white men who were the earliest shapers of internet culture," which is a problem, because we can only celebrate things like electricity, antibiotics, refrigeration, and the internet if they were invented by people with a subjectively different level of skin pigmentation in their DNA.
I'm going to skip to the end, because THE AUTHOR DOESN'T GIVE AN ANSWER.
The discomfort you feel as your thumb hovers over the screen isn't something to solve, shirk, or liberate yourself from. It might be the whole point.
What a load of garbage from a sad little person.
"Stay in a perpetual state of white guilt so that you can feel morally superior to other people through your perpetual spiritual turmoil."
Get a life, people. Choosing what emoji color you want to use should take a total of 5 seconds of your entire life. The critical race theorists (AKA commies) are just trying to divide us.
