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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

To me it seemed less racist when we all had yellow hands. Then again I think poc is a silly term - non Europeans have completely different experiences and cultures from each other even within the US.

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Indeed. Yellow was race-neutral - nobody's skin color. Then the race-ist emojis started... and discrimination sky-rocketed (e.g. there's still no ginger emojis!).

Yellow is more neutral than specific light-to-tan skin tones, but it's certainly not neutral in regards to everyone.

Or, to put it another way - if the default for all emoji was a dark magenta skin tone, would you consider that "race-neutral"?

probably would yeah

I think you'd mostly consider it bad design for the lack of contrast. But, yes?

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Yes dark magenta would be as fine as canary yellow was.

Yes, dark magenta would be fine. But must importantly, there was no race associated to the Unicode code points before and rendering was entirely up to the font choice. Now there is a defined skin color.

It's surely a firable offense, but part of me is so tempted to give a dark-skin-tone thumbs up in Slack as a white guy.

I've seen it happen - I'm just curious why? Don't think it's fireable or anything, just... weird.

When I'm bored at work I imagine ways to sew discord with tasteless emoji. It's not a sincere temptation.

Super minor note: it's "sow" (as in spread seeds, "reap what you sow" "sow wild oats) as opposed to "sew" (needle and thread...)

There was a piece on NPR saying that it's trivializing the experiences of black people. As usual, normal people don't have any problem with it, it's just a small clique of journalists and activists.

I’ve wondered about this but I’ve never seen anyone use an emoji thumbs up in anything but yellow. I can’t imagine ever setting it to match my skin color, but it would be neat to learn about people who want emojis that look more like them.

If anything, I’d be more likely to choose a color far away from my skin.

I do it because it’s a way to personalize my message and share a bit of who I am through my text. The emojis are there to emulate my face and hands during speech, so making them look like me too is helpful to conveying a little more of what a face-to-face conversation would offer.

Giving the (somewhat silly) existence of all the colors of emoji, I think the best solution would be to have the software randomly pick a color every time one is displayed.

That's the best 'race doesn't matter' statement.

To extend, why not gif animated rolling color emoji?

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