> I feel you should have more empathy for people that do not look like you.

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.

Actually, "emoji" is 絵[e] (picture) + 文字[moji] (character). A lot of them do not represent emotions, but just random pictograms. 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.

> Actually, "emoji" is 絵[e] (picture) + 文字[moji] (character). A lot of them do not represent emotions, but just random pictograms.

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.

It's not hard to imagine people making that assumption, as it is reasonable if not correct, particularly as "emoticons" and "emoji" are often used to describe the same or similar non-character glyphs. There's no need to assume bad faith on others, any more than it would be to assume ill on your part for repeating it without confirming it.

Well, I suppose the fault is shared, but it was told to me confidently enough by somebody I would generally trust in these matters. I'm not throwing any particular person under the bus here, so I think I can be as emphatic as I'd like.

Well, it is technologically possible yes, but we as humans often make the compromise for practicality and communication. Perhaps there are better tuned parameter glyphs that represent screens. ️

What he said.

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?

> For some people, race, fighting for for recognition, let alone equality, is a daily battle.

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.

>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.

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.

So read what you wrote and take note that you've implicitly assumed that Unicode and so on are strictly a product of "white people", a ridiculous notion.