The tax-payer-funded NPR news really took a deep dive into the color of emojis. You know, the little online icons used to express emotions in a world of text. According to their crazy findings, the emojis you are using are probably racist. In a world where mass oppression is a thing of the past, the folks at NPR used tax money to create an argument out of nothing.
As a taxpayer, I wonder if I can get a refund? I won’t hold my breath for one, but just thought I should throw that out there.
“Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google and Ph.D. candidate involved in the study, said the emoji modifiers were used widely but it was people with darker skin who used them in higher proportions, and more often.
After another look at Twitter data, Andrew McGill, then a writer for The Atlantic, found that some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don’t want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text, or to take advantage of something that was created to represent diversity.”
I’d argue that people often leave the emoji settings on yellow because no one really thinks about it. I mean, have you ever wondered if your emojis are oppressive? No? Then you might be a sane, normal human being.
Some white people may choose 👍 because it feels neutral — but some academics argue opting out of 👍🏻 signals a lack of awareness about white privilege, akin to society associating whiteness with being raceless.https://t.co/9g3rochT0K
— NPR (@NPR) February 9, 2022
The writer even noted that they knew someone who used darker emojis because he felt white people were ‘over represented’. I wish I were joking:
“One friend who is white told me that it was because he felt that white people were overrepresented in the space that he was using the emoji, so he wanted to kind of try and even the playing field,” Rahman said. “For me, it does signal a kind of a lack of awareness of your white privilege in many ways.”
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