For some people, race, fighting for for recognition, let alone equality, is a daily battle. You may live and work far from this conflict, but it exists, and in some part the diversity modifiers for emoji provide folks with empowerment. Don't take that away over limitations in the spec.
There are billions now who own smart phones, and want that funny Japanese Telco encoding standard to reflect their world too.
This is not a technical or standards problem, and the fitzpatrick modifiers do not decrease functionality of unicode.
I feel my point is to chill, and consider how functionality outside your perceived value might bring others joy.
Quite literally nobody has bright yellow skin. Emoji are not human beings, they are エモ → e-mo → emotion 字 → ji → characters (update: apparently I've been misled, but not in a way which changes my point, see reply below). The codepoints do not contain, have never contained, and will never contain a racial identity. They are an abstract representation of universal human emotions, just as generic as single-line ASCII emoticons.
Nobody's racial identity was represented by Unicode emoji faces to begin with, and certainly nobody any less than me.
Thanks, I really do wonder why people lie to me or make things up. I guess that's what I get for never typing it into my IME in full.
> In my opinion while encoding pictures as text was a good idea at the time (due to limitations of mobile text messages), it makes no sense in 2017 where we have technology to easily inline any picture in the text even on mobile phones.
Even at the time, the character set was apparently meant to replace common phrases and text emoticons (for SMS, as you note). There's frankly no way anyone would have the time and energy to produce high quality custom images for simple messages, save for selfies.
Also, what about people whose skin is a shade in between those provided by the skin color emoji?
I mean, if you're not representing those people you're being racist, right?
You don't need to create a new character set to do that.
People fight daily against salmonella and we don't have salmonella emoji.
Also, if you're fighting for identity you're part of the problem -- you should be fighting for ambiguity.
You see, equal rights goes both ways.
If you demand special rights because you're different, that's not equal.
You want equal rights? You got it. Let's have a straight pride parade tomorrow.
Then we'll have a men's rights rally.
Have you ever considered how condescending it is to these people to say that white people need to be the ones to give these people the ability to "reflect their world" via technology by encoding things relevant to other groups of people in the specifications they write? Why don't these people "fighting for recognition" write their specifications, and their own software? Making white people do it for them cannot be empowerment - it's charity, and with that charity comes dependence, which is the exact opposite of "empowerment". The only real empowerment comes from the self, not by other people deigning to give you things for free so their peers will think more highly of them.
I don't think Unicode consortium initially specified any color for these characters. For instance U+1F604 is defined as "SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES". I remember an early Android phone displaying these expressions on green robot faces. As far as I know color specifications only came later with the skin tone modifiers.
Those who aren't as familiar with the Simpsons would probably associate yellow with Asian --- which sort of makes sense due to them originally being Japanese.
Coloured emoji don't make much sense to me either --- they are text like any other, and should thus be represented with the same colour as the text.
Asians aren't yellow...
They didn't. It's recommended, but not required, to use a "non-realistic" colour, examples being yellow, blue, or gray.
The idea that the default emoji represent white people is ridiculous, since the codepoints are meant to translate directly with Japanese computer systems. In the original NTT DoCoMo set, they didn't even have facial skin (probably because of device resolution and colour limitations), just features like eyes and mouths. Maybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow, which people now associate strongly with the Simpsons, where white people are represented as bright saturated yellow.
In my understanding, nobody in the standardization process even considered that Emoji had a race. If people project one race or another onto what are supposed to be disembodied universal facial expressions, then that's their problem.