https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.05887.pdf
My explanation is that The Simpsons trained us to view yellow cartoon characters as white.
It's largely a generational thing.
The new generations (Millennial, Z) were taught that "celebrate diversity" is the goal. Which means to highlight all the different races, creeds, colors, etc...
Previous generations (X, Boomers) were taught that being "color blind" was the ideal. Which means to treat every person the same, and disregard their race, creed, colors, etc...
Both groups are using the same language for the goal: To end racism. But the ways they were trained to do so are the exact opposite of each other.
Being blind to race means being blind to acts of racism. It discredits the reality of those who experience race- or gender-based discrimination because the systemic blindness won't acknowledge the differences even exist.
Prejudice still happens even if the aggressors have good motivations or think they're "good" people.
No, it doesn't. That's a lovely slogan, but nothing more. People have the capacity to both treat everyone equally, and also notice when some people have not, currently or historically, been treated equally.
Prejudice still happens even if the aggressors have good motivations or think they're "good" people.
Mirrors are very useful tools.
Its an emotionally appealing but logically nonsensical justification for bigotry. And particularly appealing to people who are more interested in power than actual equality.
It would be pretty terrible if a historically "dominant" demographic felt persecuted because of equal options with emoji colors.
>Excluding skin color and gender is being blind to prejudice, not fighting it.
Which implies that historic and current prejudice must be corrected with more prejudice. Which is inconsistent with inclusiveness and equality. And we've all seen how this works in practice - certain races and one gender in particular are expected to prejudge other participants and cede their vaguely defined, unilaterally assigned and assumed privilege to create concrete prejudiced privilege for others in the "inclusive" group. And given that personal circumstances are irrelevant, this the definition of prejudice. While you may refuse to acknowledge this explicitly, logically your approach to solving racism is more racism. Which leads me to conclude that at least the loudest among the D&I camp are only using claims of equality as a thin disguise for powermongering.
>It would be pretty terrible if a historically "dominant" demographic felt persecuted because of equal options with emoji colors.
And here, ironically, you are proving my point. To correct historic injustice we are obligated to immediately dismiss any grievances from white people, bonus for snark and sarcasm. When minorities complain, all claims are immediately valid, but if whites (and sometimes Asians, when politically expedient) raise legitimate concerns, they're just being fragile. That's prejudice, my friend. And the degree to which it has become casually acceptable in increasingly larger circles is concerning.
By the way, I don't think anyone is concerned over the expanded color pallet itself, its the insistence that injecting divisive racialism into a race agnostic communication tool is the solution to prejudice. Even assuming that minorities are offended by a single yellow option is racist, much in the same way that latino people don't actually care for the similarly misguided "latinx" designation.
I'm not sure why having different colored emojis has triggered an essay to redefine inclusivity as persecution for some hypothetical "dominant" demographic, but you are proving my point.
By using weak words to avoiding naming the demographic you feel is actually persecuted here, you're turning a blind eye to centuries of prejudicial conflict and injustice - context that defeats your attempt at semantics.
You didn't even read my post.
>Equality feels like persecution to those hold all the privileges
This is carte blanche to be racist to anyone defined as privileged by the socially/politically dominant group. You're playing with fire. Only a matter of time before, as in the past, the ire is directed at you and the people you think you're fighting for. How far down the privilege totem pole are you?
It's marxism through and through, except the proles and bourgeoise have been replaced with racial classes. I encourage you to at least read the communist manifesto and see the direct parallels, right down to the language of "oppression".
s/petite bourgeois/white adjacent/g s/proletariat/minority/g
Don't forget, they also usually have a little discussed special category for lumpenproletariat, where competent true believers go when they outlive their usefulness.
imagine trying to explain to aliens from another planet 500 years from now why 500 years ago we decided to a.) include skin tone modifiers to begin with and b.) only allow for the gradation of skin colors that we do. beyond ridiculous.
EDIT: I forgot to mention how insanely ridiculous it is that we have these skin tone modifiers, but they don't even work for all "people" emoji, because of the obvious issue of rendering cartoon human faces in a way that isn't considered a racist caricature for many races. this makes sense of course, but I can't understand why, when this argument came up, they didn't just choose to scrap the whole idea instead of implementing it and restricting it to a subset of "people" emoji.
(No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later).
because why would we add further bloat and implementation complexity to something that is already bloated and complex to implement?
This is kind of how I felt when looking at the scale just now, because none of the 10 really look like me. Maybe it's supposed to be a round-down/up sort of thing, or maybe I should calibrate my display?
[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-LEGO-minifigures-have-yellow-he...
Given the history, one could make an argument that they represent Asians rather than Caucasians (it's always seemed odd to me that we ended up with this name for white(r) people, but such is life).
It's a very nice technology and is an example of permanent whole body genetic mutation via epigenetics.The issue is that it is irreversible.. The converse, a whitening substance does not exist yet but could exist in theory, by antagonizing the melanin receptors.
then you take the history of emoji into account and you see that that doesn't really work as an explanation at all. it's like you (and everyone else who makes this inane argument) are trying to make something that's not white-people-centric, white-people-centric, just so you can complain about it being white-people-centric.
It is how Lego originated. See discussion at [0]. Early on they had a limited palette and would use yellow for caucasians and asians and at times used black for POC and red for native americans. The time where everything was yellow is also quite limited - and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-LEGO-minifigures-have-yellow-he...
1978-2003 is hardly a limited timespan in the history of LEGO!
> and there was pushback from non-cacuasians until they were forced to include skin colours in NBA sets.
right, because this is when they decided to make minifigs look like real people, instead of imaginary, race-neutral-ish, yellow people, once they got into licensing the appearance of real people for their minifigs!
I guess you missed the day Yellow Peril was covered in history class.
The longest running cartoon show in history (The Simpsons) uses yellow to represent white people, while POC are brown and black.