The folks at NPR have deemed the emojis you use on social media as racist. You know, the little yellow-toned smiley faces and thumbs up? All micro racist gestures are meant to oppress… Who? Honestly, I’m not sure. I read NPR’s reasoning and it still just sounded like a joke to me.
On one hand, NPR argued that people of color choose a skin tone more closely resembling their own but I can’t help but see this as a nonissue. In a world where mass oppression based on skin color doesn’t exist, this seems like a stretch to create controversy.
“Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google and Ph.D. candidate involved in the study, said the emoji modifiers were used widely but it was people with darker skin who used them in higher proportions, and more often.
After another look at Twitter data, Andrew McGill, then a writer for The Atlantic, found that some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don’t want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text, or to take advantage of something that was created to represent diversity.”
Some white people may choose 👍 because it feels neutral — but some academics argue opting out of 👍🏻 signals a lack of awareness about white privilege, akin to society associating whiteness with being raceless.https://t.co/9g3rochT0K
— NPR (@NPR) February 9, 2022
The article goes on to explain how White shame prevents some from choosing s skin tone closer to their own by saying, “One friend who is white told me that it was because he felt that white people were overrepresented in the space that he was using the emoji, so he wanted to kind of try and even the playing field,” Rahman said. “For me, it does signal a kind of a lack of awareness of your white privilege in many ways.”
To me, this feels like a prime example of how nets want to create controversy where none otherwise existed. NPR is taxpayer-funded so the most irritating thing about all of this is that we all paid for this ‘study’. That’s just my opinion. Do you think emojis’ can be racist? Let me know in the comments below.