NPR's Strange Race Obsession Leads It to Old News
In 2018, researchers at the University of Edinburgh published a study looking at the use of race-based emoji, the digital characters people use in texting. For the longest time, emoji were all uniformly yellow. In 2015, software updates across platforms allowed individuals to choose their color preference to match one of five skin tones in addition to the default yellow.
It is important to get the timeline right here. The emoji changes came in 2015. The Atlantic published a short piece in 2016 on white people sticking with the yellow defaults. The research study came in 2018. The American presidential election came in 2020. National Public Radio, which bragged about ignoring the Hunter Biden story in 2020, only just decided to report on the 2018 research and linked to the 2016 Atlantic piece. Perhaps sometime in 2040, they will get around to reporting on Hunter Biden’s deals with China and the use of crack cocaine.
According to NPR’s report, “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.” One of the researchers involved in the 2018 study told NPR, “there was a default in society to associate whiteness with being raceless, and the emojis gave white people an option to make their race explicit.”
The entirety of National Public Radio’s story, the original research, and the outrage is the height of self-centered ridiculousness. People in the present age quest for things about which to judge others and criticize. Now, keeping the default emoji color is a sign of white privilege. It could just be a sign of not caring.
The presumption in the piece is that non-white people embraced the use of racial emoji. Ironically, in the actual research paper, the researchers note that “T5,” which is the darkest skin tone, is the least used emoji color, even in African nations. Also, the United States has the most even distribution between skin tones. It is important to note that the researchers only used Twitter and its tweets so they have no actual idea how many people use race based emoji in their private text messages. Most importantly, most people still use the default the yellow, regardless of race.