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.
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Is there a significance to using skin-tone emojis, and if so, what is it?
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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 😝 !!
I feel this is like saying the Simpsons, and most of Springfield, aren’t supposed to be white because their skin is yellow.
It’s no surprise the default emoji color is so close to white skin, and it’s no surprise that some people feel a lack of representation by this.
But emoji’s are not derived from the Simpsons. They’re derived from the yellow smiley face ideogram that originated in the 1960s, it was designed by the artist Harvey Ball.
It’s yellow, not because it’s supposed to represent whiteness, but because the company colors of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company it was designed for were yellow and black, and because it feels sunny, bright and positive. It’s an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun, and does not represent a human with a specific skin color.