Apple on Thursday introduced its new racially diverse emojis, allowing users to cycle through various shades of white and brown to customize their emojis’ skin colors. Some rejoiced, with choruses of “We made it” flanked by newly black praise-hand emojis filling Instagram and Twitter. Some even professed to cry tears of joy over this sign of racial inclusion. But already, Apple’s well-intentioned gesture to human diversity has taken a turn for the worse. The emojis are being used to make racist comments on social media and insert questions of race in texts and tweets where it may never have arisen before. Instead of correcting its mistake — excluding people of color from emojis — Apple has, in some ways, made the situation worse.
In trying to advocate for racial inclusivity in its iOS 8.3 update, Apple has allowed for further racial segregation with these new emojis. Because I’m black, should I now feel compelled to use the “appropriate” brown-skinned nail-painting emoji? Why would I use the white one? Now in simple text messages and tweets, I have to identify myself racially. I’ll now question other people’s emoji use when they’re speaking to me: Why is he sending me the black angel emoji specifically? Why is she sending me the black-girl emoji instead of the white one? What Apple has done is introduce race into everyday conversations where it doesn’t necessarily need to be. Clorox already has felt the weight of that reality, when in response to the new emojis, the brand tweeted “where’s the bleach?” The barrage of criticism that followed the face-palm moment pressured the company to tweet an apology, noting that it never meant the comment as a reference to race.
But predictably, many people are using the multicultural emojis to refer to race, and in the worst ways possible:
Apple’s intent was good. But the execution was completely flawed. Apple took the easy way out. Instead of creating actual emojis of color, Apple simply allows its users to make white emojis a different color. With this update, the company skirts around having to attribute certain physical characteristics to certain races of people. For example, there’s nothing specifically “black” about an emoji with browner skin. Deepening the skin color of a previously white emoji doesn’t make the emoji not white. It’s just a bastardized emoji blackface. The blond-haired emoji man and the blue-eyed emoji princess are clearly white, but you can slip them into a darker-colored skin. These new figures aren’t emojis of color; they’re just white emojis wearing masks.
Understandably, Apple didn’t want to create caricatures, giving those emojis an afro or thicker lips. But the company had already done something similar. With the first batch of emojis, they clearly identified one character as Asian, giving it narrow eyes and a skull cap. Another was clearly identified as Middle Eastern, with browner skin and a turban. And many were identified as white, with blond hair and blue eyes. Apple should have simply removed the racialized emojis altogether. What they did instead was homogenize and whitewash them. And now, in an absurd twist, you can change the skin tone of emojis that were specified as Asian or Middle Eastern. It’s political correctness gone wild.
Apple’s mistake was in ever introducing the concept of race to emojis in the first place. Now, if I use two smiley faces to represent me and a white friend, I have to contemplate what color emojis to use. With some of these emojis, it seems as if Apple included a diverse skin tone option for the sake of it, like with the racing horse; the jockey’s face is nearly too small to even see what race he is. The company should’ve never made race a question, making the emojis raceless with yellow faces and leaving it at that. This, instead, seems like a big horse and pony parade by Apple to appease people of color. Sure, it’d be nice to see some emojis that look like me. But, at the end of the day, none of these really do.