People of color have only had ‘turban guy’ for years. It’s only fair that white people should learn to navigate a world where the only emoji princess has brown skin
Apple’s emoji keyboard has a number of notable omissions: avocado, bed, taco,
levitating businessman. But by far the most glaring imperfection, as emoji become more and more indispensable to the daily texting habits of
sexy people, has been the overwhelming whiteness of all the little cartoon people. With two exceptions – a man in a turban, and another who seems to be coded as Chinese based on his hat – every emoji human or human part, from haircut woman to flexing arm to Santa Claus, is Caucasian-pink. At least, so far.
With the next iOS upgrade, it seems this may finally change. Last year, the Unicode Consortium, which develops the Unicode Standard from which iPhone and other emoji draw,
announced
that more diverse emoji were on the way. Now, beta versions of updated Mac and iOS operating systems show how the new icons will look
and how they’ll operate: hold down on any human emoji, and you’ll bring up a menu of different color options based on the Fitzpatrick scale
of skin tone.
Originally, I thought the emoji variations would be a pullout menu from the current emoji keyboard – in other words, that they would default to white, but offer other colors by request. We have enough trouble with real-life folks treating “white person” as the default form of human; making white be the literal default setting for human icons sound disastrous. But Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic
set me straight: emoji people will echo the bright yellow of their more cartoonish cousins. The emoji keyboard currently contains two kinds of face icon – the ones that look like drawings of people, which are now Caucasian pink, and the ones that look like the button on the cover of Watchmen.
The “hold down to change color” option is an elegant solution (I was worried the new emoji would make the keyboard even more unwieldy than it already is), and the yellow default is better than the current white-or-nothing. But I admit: I was kind of hoping that the white emoji would just... go away. Not all of them! We can keep some of them around for the Oscars. In my heart of hearts, though, I’ve been a little bummed out that every purportedly diverse keyboard still includes white options for every face. People of color have spent years with no representation except “turban guy” – no cop, no angel, no grandma, no Buckingham Palace dude (has anyone ever used this?) that looks like them. Even the disembodied hands are white. It’s only fair that white people should figure out how to navigate a digital world where the only emoji princess has brown skin.
And forcing white people to represent themselves with non-white icons isn’t just a matter of “turnabout is fair play”. In 2007, Stanford researchers
described
a phenomenon they called the “Proteus effect,” where people internalize the characteristics of their online avatars. If you’re asked to identify with an attractive virtual persona, for instance, you tend to act more flirty; if it’s a character in a scary uniform, you act more aggressive. The Proteus effect doesn’t just last while you’re online. Men who used a tall avatar, for instance, were more confident while interacting virtually – but also for at least
half an hour
after they logged off.
How we represent ourselves online matters – though it probably matters more for video games and virtual worlds, places where you’re actively controlling an animated self. Here, too, there are sometimes opportunities to tweak the usual “white male” default, but it’s rarely a requirement. That’s not exactly surprising – white male gamers are not known for responding maturely to requests that they empathize with other types of people – but it feels like a missed opportunity. Imagine what we could do with the Proteus effect if they were! Heck, a really popular game with a default avatar who just looks like a nice young man who wouldn’t threaten to rape anyone might instantly improve the overall mood on Twitter.
Still, many of us play video games only occasionally, but represent ourselves using emoji every day. Does the Proteus effect hold when your “character” is just a static cartoon icon? We don’t know yet, but isn’t it worth a try? Let white people make do for a change. If we figured out that an eggplant can stand-in for a penis, we can figure out how to identify with a darker mustachioed guy or thumbs-up hand. It might do us good to see ourselves differently for a change.