One of the problems of current society; trying to minimize & tackle the sensitive issues of discrimination (racial, gender, sexual, religious etc.) by not investing enough time & resources to thoroughly understand the problem & then find its appropriate solutions. Trivializing or even deflecting a serious problem will not make it go away (as some may believe) but make the issue that much bigger when it's keep simmering below the surface when it is not handled in a proper way.
Trying to handle such critical issues as racial or gender discrimination through emojis or Barbie dolls isn't solving the problem but making it even worse. What does Apple is trying to say to the world through these colourful emojis ... that they are racially neutral? What Apple should have been doing was making its hiring practices more neutral & removing discrimination from it. An African-American/Canadian Barbie doll or an emoji is not going to suddenly get the people talking about race relations in North America or help change North American businesses' eliminate or reduce discrimination; that is just trivializing a serious problem.
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And there is a lot to say about the normalization of our media, about the belief that whiteness is our baseline, even as Caucasians become a racial minority in countries around the world. It is, no doubt, a problem; look no further than the marginalization of African-Americans from the Academy Awards, or the quiet neutering of Asian actors & actresses. A New York Times feature just this weekend helped to expose the insidious bias against black people in photography: “In our time, as in previous generations, cameras & the mechanical tools of photography have rarely made it easy to photograph black skin,” wrote Teju Cole. “Beginning in the mid-1940s, the smaller film-developing units manufactured by Kodak came with Shirley cards, so-named after the white model who was featured on them & whose whiteness was marked on the cards as ‘normal.’ ” Across a wide swath of pop culture, the idea that white is the standard has become ingrained.
The problem is, the idea and execution of racially representative emojis completely misses the point.
For starters, emojis never really had a race problem. The invention of Shigetaka Kurita, emoji have an Asian root that has in many ways been whitewashed over, with many of the original ones depicting Japanese-centric images such as a bowing businessman ...
So the standard baseline in emojis was never really white—that’s a later interpretation that society has applied.
And the reality of racial representation is that it will, invariably, leave someone out and leave someone unhappy. It has already begun; social media has noted there is no one with freckles & red hair among the six new colour options for each emoji. The backlash has started, too, as some have been furious over the bright yellow of what they are seeing as the “East Asian” skin colour—ironic, since they’re actually referring to the aforementioned “cartoon-like” emoji complexion, as Asians are not technically depicted at all, given the fact the new emojis reportedly hew to the Fitzpatrick scale, a “dermatological standard” for judging race. (The Fitzpatrick scale did not adequately measure non-white skin colour for years after its 1975 creation, dumping all non-white skin into one category.)
That doesn’t even cover the fact that racial representation in emojis squelches the very thing that makes emojis tick, which is their loose, ambiguous interpretative quality. ... the fun of emojis are that they mean nothing, & therefore, can mean anything.
And while it’s hardly wrong to get our hackles up over race, it seems odd that the hill we are choosing to defend is the one where the baseline was an intentionally preposterous complexion for a fun thing whose use is derived by its ambiguity.
Trying to handle such critical issues as racial or gender discrimination through emojis or Barbie dolls isn't solving the problem but making it even worse. What does Apple is trying to say to the world through these colourful emojis ... that they are racially neutral? What Apple should have been doing was making its hiring practices more neutral & removing discrimination from it. An African-American/Canadian Barbie doll or an emoji is not going to suddenly get the people talking about race relations in North America or help change North American businesses' eliminate or reduce discrimination; that is just trivializing a serious problem.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And there is a lot to say about the normalization of our media, about the belief that whiteness is our baseline, even as Caucasians become a racial minority in countries around the world. It is, no doubt, a problem; look no further than the marginalization of African-Americans from the Academy Awards, or the quiet neutering of Asian actors & actresses. A New York Times feature just this weekend helped to expose the insidious bias against black people in photography: “In our time, as in previous generations, cameras & the mechanical tools of photography have rarely made it easy to photograph black skin,” wrote Teju Cole. “Beginning in the mid-1940s, the smaller film-developing units manufactured by Kodak came with Shirley cards, so-named after the white model who was featured on them & whose whiteness was marked on the cards as ‘normal.’ ” Across a wide swath of pop culture, the idea that white is the standard has become ingrained.
The problem is, the idea and execution of racially representative emojis completely misses the point.
For starters, emojis never really had a race problem. The invention of Shigetaka Kurita, emoji have an Asian root that has in many ways been whitewashed over, with many of the original ones depicting Japanese-centric images such as a bowing businessman ...
So the standard baseline in emojis was never really white—that’s a later interpretation that society has applied.
And the reality of racial representation is that it will, invariably, leave someone out and leave someone unhappy. It has already begun; social media has noted there is no one with freckles & red hair among the six new colour options for each emoji. The backlash has started, too, as some have been furious over the bright yellow of what they are seeing as the “East Asian” skin colour—ironic, since they’re actually referring to the aforementioned “cartoon-like” emoji complexion, as Asians are not technically depicted at all, given the fact the new emojis reportedly hew to the Fitzpatrick scale, a “dermatological standard” for judging race. (The Fitzpatrick scale did not adequately measure non-white skin colour for years after its 1975 creation, dumping all non-white skin into one category.)
That doesn’t even cover the fact that racial representation in emojis squelches the very thing that makes emojis tick, which is their loose, ambiguous interpretative quality. ... the fun of emojis are that they mean nothing, & therefore, can mean anything.
And while it’s hardly wrong to get our hackles up over race, it seems odd that the hill we are choosing to defend is the one where the baseline was an intentionally preposterous complexion for a fun thing whose use is derived by its ambiguity.
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