But the billions of people who aren't white might have a problem with it.
> But the billions of people who aren't white might have a problem with it.
I'm not white, and I have a problem with "skin tone" emoji.
Previously, skin tones for emoji were left up to the font creator. In practice, this meant that they were usually lime green, neon blue, or Simpsons yellow, all of which are cartoonish enough not to be evocative of any particular real-life skintone.
I can't really imagine a situation in which drawing attention to the race of an emoji character is desirable or even acceptable. I'm sure some exist, but they're nowhere near important enough to be included in the actual standard itself.
Beyond that, the skin tones used are incredibly reductive. Human skin tones are not as simple as 6 different shades of brown. (I, for one, cannot match my skin tone to any of the examples on the Unicode website). And if we want to get philosophical, there are a number of ways in which race and culture are encoded (literally) into emoji that are far more subtle, yet more significant, than the color used to render the skin of the faces. In a way, it reminds me of the picture-interpretation tests that they used to administer at Ellis Island to "prove" that certain immigrants were not "fit" for life in the US, though that's perhaps a topic for another day.
That's not true, IME -- in several of the popular emoji fonts I've seen that don't incorporate specific "skin tone emoji", most emoji for people that aren't expressly silhouettes are white, except a very small number which are black (in both cases, within the range of flesh tones usually associated with those as races, not cartoonish colors.)
EDIT: This is not true of "smiley face" emoji, but of other emoji representing humans or human body parts.
Yes, they are a bit more complicated. But 6 choices that correspond to a widely-used system (Fitzpatrick) is far better than none.
The fact that a system is widely used when classifying the impact of UV light on melanoma does not imply that it has relevance in another.
> 6 choices is far better than none.
Actually, no, sometimes the "solution" is worse than the problem. It's quite regressive to bake an outdated conception of the color theory of race into a standard that aims to "educate and engage academic and scientific communities, and the general public" (the stated mission of the Unicode Consortium).
As one of the "billions of people who aren't white" that you refer to in your original comment, I find this approach more problematic than the existing status quo (leaving it up to the font creators).
Nobody said anything about race, thats your assumption. These emoji are merely presenting different skin tones.
Emoticons and emoji have traditionally been displayed as yellow cirlces with large faces. White emojis have been the exception, not the rule. I have never had a problem with being represented by a character with Jaundice (a medical condition turning your skin yellow).
If your skin color is already represented you have the privilege of not having to worry about inclusivity of others being represented.
However, I'm not sure this applies to you since I'm not sure what race you are.
Not at all true. Most emoji implementations (Japanese mobile providers, Apple) used white faces.
Google and Microsoft’s neutral yellow was a lot more neutral there, yes.
Nope. Usually white (Apple, Japanese phones).
There are not billions of Japanese people and their skin tone is light (though they're not European).
