* I first heard about the race-toned emoji last year, during office hours for a college class I was teaching. Two black students were sitting doing practice problems (and playing on their phones), and one looked up and said to the other, “look! black emoji!” and then excitedly tried them out. (This student may or may not have appeared in one of the Black Autumn videos that Steve posted this past fall.)
At this point, I came dangerously close to talking myself out of my second job: “Oh that’s too bad- I liked it when everyone was just yellow. This seems like a way of making people even more conscious of race all the time…” and then corrected myself, “but of course people want different options. Let’s look at those practice constrained optimization problems.”
The Atlantic article is interesting in admitting that any sign of highlighting one’s own white identity is disfavored. Like my knee jerk response to my students, it seems to be walking up to the line of pointing out that every non-white group is encouraged to celebrate/overemphasize its own group difference, while whites are encouraged to hide and softpedal theirs. Then the author walks it back, because 2016 and because The Atlantic.
* One very funny conversation I witnessed in New York was a White South African talking to a Black American and referring to her as a Black American. She then attempted to correct him by saying she preferred being called an African American, to which he replied along the lines of “That’s absurd … I’m an African … A white one … And you are an American … A black one.”
* White people who use emojis (?) probably leave them in the default color (which is yellow) in greater percentages because white people aren’t very likely to give a shit. It’s a little cartoon hand, you know?
People who make their race a big part of their personal identities, like blacks or mestizos in the United States, probably go out of their way to change it to prove some kind of point. The hand’s tint is important to them, for whatever inscrutable reasons.
So if you have fifty white guys and fifty colored guys, you’ll end up with forty or fifty colored symbols, fifty or sixty default (yellow) ones, and a handful of white versions from the handful of white people who think it’s worth the extra second or two that it takes to switch the thing from Marge Simpson to Tilda Swinton.
* Maybe whites are the only “raceless color” because for a white person to openly identify with their race is forbidden?
Seriously, I’ve been hearing all my life about how whites supposedly have an “advantage” because we are seen as the “default,” not possessing a race. But nobody ever points out that part of the reason whites have this “advantage” is because the alternative — white racial consciousness — is closed off for us.
I keep wondering when the SJWs are gonna wake up to the fact that crap like this — whipping up a jealous race pride among every other group while conspicuously denying it to whites, even in its blandest, most inoffensive form — threatens to eventually legitimize hard-core white racism. But apparently they’re convinced that they’ve sealed that genie in the bottle for all time.
* It is my belief that the elites do want a real hard-core white backlash, one that causes a “vaccination” like effect on the social immune system. The OKC bombing in 1995 was instrumental in Clinton’s re-election, as was the 2011 Giffords shooting to Obama.
When the first reaction to the Brussels bombings was a large demonstration of people waving Nazi flags, the elites got exactly what they wanted. All their opponents smoked out into the open, to be tagged by the security services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trust
Look at PFAW, ADL and SPLC. They don’t have real enemies right now, but are quite well funded off of fear-mongering over small potatoes.
Now view their UK and France counterparts (Hopenothate, SOS Racisme). Far more media prominence, and government funding. The British call it the Quango.
* Emoji are for people who can’t compose or punctuate English sentences, which probably includes a large part of our population today.
I use emoji to communicate with my 5-year old grandson who has mastered the technical aspects of the iPhone. (He doesn’t have his own phone yet; he borrows them from family members.) Although in pre-kindergarten, he knows how to spell family names and is getting better with simple phrases like, “I love you ….” For the time being, sending emoji back and forth will have to do until he becomes literate, which I predict will happen in the first or second grade.
