Are Your Emojis Racist?Publicly funded journalists continue to tackle the hard questions.
By Declan Leary
February 12, 2022
"Heath Racela identifies as three-quarters white and one-quarter Filipino,” begins a National Public Radio report published on the internet this week, detailing the fraught racial politics of choosing emoji skin colors. Your humble correspondent, for those who might be wondering, identifies as one-half white and one-half Irish.
It’s a rather strange construction. Either Mr. (Mx.?) Racela is one-quarter Filipino, or he is not. Race and ethnicity seem odd arenas for the advancement of the self-identification fad. These past few years we have witnessed the mainstreaming of a zealous race essentialism which asserts that such identities are the burdens of our history—inescapable if inconvenient facts handed down to us from the past.
Could the descendants of early American slavers wake up tomorrow and decide to identify as pureblood Javanese? Are the white progressives—Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug—who pretended to be black, then lost their careers and reputations on being outed, suddenly owed an apology?
My sense is that the trio of journalists whose bylines grace this groundbreaking piece of work would answer in the negative on both counts. (Why it took three people to produce “Which skin color emoji should you use? The answer can be more complex than you think” is a different question altogether, and entirely beyond me.)
Yet in the report we are introduced on these terms not just to Racela but to Sarai Cole, who “is originally from California and identifies as Black and an American Descendant of Slavery,” and Jennifer Epperson, who “identifies as Black.” In all this, admittedly, no identifier is more outrageous than “Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google and Ph.D. candidate,” whose racial identification is not provided. (Nor are those of writers Andrew McGill and Zara Rahman, the other two people named.)
The emoji issue has apparently been litigated and relitigated in the press ever since the color options debuted in 2015. The following spring, McGill wrote a piece in the Atlantic celebrating the progress made—just a year before, “if a black man or a Latino woman wanted to text a friend the thumbs-up emoji on an iPhone, a white hand would show up.” (Don’t ask me what a Latino woman is; I prefer “Latinx birthing person.”) But the color revolution, McGill contended in conclusion, still had a long way to go:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/are-your-emojis-racist/
