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 😝 !!

  • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
    1·
    24 days 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.

  • lovely_reader@lemmy.world
    1·
    21 days ago

    This came up in an anti-racism group I belonged to many years ago, where I learned to try to be aware of my acceptance of whiteness as “default” or somehow raceless. I also learned not to jump in and center myself in conversations about how race is (or worse, should be) perceived by those negatively affected or sensitive to it—or at least I thought I learned that, but here I am about to press send.

    I came away from that conversation with an understanding that while I may feel that my race is immaterial to my identity and my point of view, it is nonetheless a real component of the context of my attitudes and online presence, so it’s valuable to ask if there’s a reason I’d want to hide it.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    23 days ago

    I have a white friend that uses the dark brown emojis, which I’m kind of uncomfortable with. I think he thinks he’s showing solidarity. To me it seems like blackfishing. I haven’t put any more thought into it though, as it is a pretty minor thing in a world with much more important things to be concerned with.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    25 days 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.

  • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
    0·
    24 days ago

    The yellow should be the only one. I find it absolutely idiotic that they needed to include all different skin colors. I think that’s similar to my native language (Finnish) not having gender specific pronouns (hän = he/she) and then someone wanting to come up with ones. That’s “fixing” a problem that didn’t even exist in the first place.

        • algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org
          0·
          23 days ago

          It’s still pretty light if we’re considering the array of skin tones that are throughout humanity. If you weren’t Finnish, but instead African or Indian or South American for example, maybe you wouldn’t feel that yellow was representative of you and your people. Saying yellow is fine for everyone because you feel it’s fine isn’t taking into account the other billions of opinions in the world.