Title

If a person took the extra effort to send me the white thumb emoji instead of the yellow one I would assume very mean things about them
- Exactly

I've used ✊ as a certain flavor of "fuck yeah" before
✊🏻 hits wayyy different than that
- Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
- All lives matter vibes

"Time for your discussion about which emoji thumbs white people should use to solve racism!"
Reparations pls
- We have to be careful with the way we speak if we don't want to alienate people. So: Will we deny reparations to black and brown people, or will we deny them to people of color?
  
  We will give reparations to BIPOC, but only in the form of an IMF loan, with 200% interest rate

This is the shit that conservatives think we care about
- This is why we need revolution, to make sure people use emojis right 😞
- To be fair to conservatives... there are 61 comments in here
  
  bikeshedding
  
  Metacaring is not the same as caring
- Liberal media has literally folded into making the parody articles that Alt Righters would write about them 5 years ago. Every serious ideologue has either doubled down on their worst traits or crossed over to the actual left

I won't be satisfied ubtil they add skin tones to 🍆
- 👍
- The only worthwhile take on this whole post.

As an Asian person, am I supposed to use the yellow emoji or the white emoji if that's closer to my actual skin tone?
Please help me crowdfund to get an answer from America's foremost emoji raceologists.
- If you have calipers on hand, could you take the normal measurements of your skull and send them to me? I'll get back to you within 3-7 business days on which emoji is most applicable. Please include $20 dollars in vbucks as payment.
  
  Oh shit I don't have Vbucks. Will you accept Robux instead? I really need to know.
- I don’t have an answer for you, but I am offering a position at the Democracy Institute for Equality and Business Think Tank

I've never seen anyone use anything but 👍
This feels like an attempt by Big Emoji to get people to actually use the other ones
Not like us here, with our prodigious amounts of quality, original emoji
- Some of my poc friends use the brown ones. I wouldn't give them a hard time about it. But speaking as someone who is white passing using the white skin emojis would be too weird
  
  i always make mine brown some of my friends do, most dont. yellow makes me feel like a Simpsons character. no one cares.
  
  Just seems like an extra step for emoji I already barely use to be honest. Occasionally use like 👍🏽 or smth, but I mostly just hit the default simpsons one. In any case it's a very weird thing to police
  
  I don’t see why it’s weird lol. The entire point of the skin tone update was to give people more customization for basic, cartoon expressions. I would be more weirded out by people if they told me they felt weird about using their skin tone cause they’re too white
- my mom is brown, and uses the brown ones, but the brown one is way darker than she is and so it just seems kinda off. It's like, mom, your skin tone is Halle Berry, not Grace Jones
  (i'd never tell her that tho)

Every white person who selects the non yellow emoji is automatically sus
- For the next 5 minutes, every white person who responds with a brown-skin emoji gets to be honorary
  
  "Your honor, my client had sent a brown-skin emoji before he started rapping"
  
  Since the 5 minutes is over, honorary what?

This is radlib quibbling through and through, but I want to add a refutation anyway:
There was discussion before on this site about how nominally white people shouldn't identify with whiteness. Isn't this an example of that, however trivial? Unless I'm a racist, why would I ever want to go out of my way to further identify myself with whiteness? I won't deny that my experience is one of being white and in fact want to be transparent about it, but that's not the same as wanting to append "as a honky" to every statement I make. That's White Pride shit (i.e. shit)
- I feel like it will always be a catch 22 with no right answers on an individual level until racism has been dealt with structurally. As a white person, you cannot be ethically pure in the world as it is, even though obviously something like this is really trivial
  
  As a white person
  In all seriousness, how do I tell if I'm white? I keep thinking about another user's example of Assad. He appears white-passing, but his name, religion and nationality would each be enough for him to be considered non-white in the US.
  And is a case like that one where it actually matters to what extent the person identifies with whiteness?
  
  Yeah, I'm not saying it's a perfect retort but I think in this case it's pretty clear that snow roaches using the yellow emojis is better.
- I swear. If people talked to me about this shit IRL I would suspect them of being a federal agent more than someone talking about blowing things up
  
  Did you intend to be responding to the OOP?
  
  Frr seriously, that take feels like a surefire way to create dozens of separate interpretations and a thousand confused, circular arguments between them. Instead of just having people admit the obvious, they'd rather we go the long way and alienate each other unintentionally. Not good for much else.
- I don't identify with whiteness because I'm 1/8 Irish and celts aren't white.
  
  Which 1/8? And is it a horizontal slice or a vertical one?
- I think its one of those liminal things, sorry for using that word. You shouldnt identify as white because its not a thing but theres no going around the fact that your skin is white and the rest of the world perceives you as white.
  I feel like I mostly buy into this but I also don't believe in the radlib sense of endless guilt, wokescolding and apologizing for it.
  You should use the white skin emoji is written by someone who works from home and never leaves the house. All their interactions are through social media.
  Like, there should be spheres of communication and they dont all overlap with eachother. The shit you say to your IRL friends doesnt make it out to your public Instagram page because you cant make the same type of qualitative and quantitative social agreements on the broad internet space that you can with your IRL friends.

I almost exclusively use the cat face emojis
- yeah but 🐈‍⬛ or 🐈?
  
  Depends on which of my cats was a brat to me recently.
  
  😺😸😹😻😼😽🙀😿😾🐱🐈🐈‍⬛

I use an Android with gboard so I only use giant combo emojis. If you aren't using these you need to be. It's the one thing Google has done right in like 20 years.

This is the kind of shit you think about when you don't give a shit about capital literally destroying the Earth in real time

Why does my emoji have to match my real body? I type :) all the time but I can confirm my eyes are not two dots and my smile does not stretch around them like that..
- my smile does not stretch around them like that
  y so srs
- Simpsons Appropriation

am I doing this right?

I'm just terminally jaundiced 👍
- It's the Simpsons emoji

I’ve never felt the need to go into my settings to change my skin color. I wouldn’t even know where to find the setting.
- Extremely telling that you don't even know where the setting is (it's in "Themes" btw). Your privilege is showing
  
  My ass actually went to look. Feeling very boomerish rn
- On iOS, you just long press on the emoji you want to change the skin color of.
  It's obviously going to vary based on your OS.
  
  That makes more sense than what I was thinking. Oops
- You're telling on yourself.

A modest proposal: Only 😭 should have a white skin color option. Lmao
- If you’re from the future, this will tell you if it has one: 😭🏻
- i get irrationally angry every time i see a 😭 or 💀
  
  Lmao ur a loser, you hate smilies!!!! 😂😂🤣🤣
  
  💀
- Only 💀 should be white, and it is, so the rest can be removed
  [This is a joke]
  
  In Brazil we use 💀 to celebrate Olavo de Carvalho's pathetic demise.

I did think about this a few years ago and opted for 👍. I feel a little weird when I see the white reacts used by others. This is not so much of a problem anymore but Slack/etc used to not stack the reacts, so if everyone was thumbs-upping you'd have a bunch of different ones instead of just one count and it made voting with 👍👎 more difficult. If nonwhite comrades tell me they prefer the white ones I'll switch but I suspect nobody gives a shit.
- I'm honestly a little suspicious of anyone who uses the white 👍. I feel like the only people who care enough to explicitly use it instead of the yellow are either virtue signalling liberals or white supremacists. I'm probably reading far, far too much into people's emoji choices though.
  
  That is absolutely the vibe I get from white skin emojis. It is almost always a performative liberal or a barely cloaked fascist
  
  I find any non-default emoji colour weird. Like why do you feel the need to tell me your skin colour?
  
  I’m genuinely baffled by these kinds of responses lol. Did I miss a big event where liberals were using white emojis or something? The first thing I think about when I see 👏🏻 is “this person is either white or have white skin” and move on with my life
- I'm white, but I'm also fairly confident no one gives a shit. The Simpsons colored one isn't to be "raceless." It's just the default. It's for anyone (not just white people) who don't care to broadcast their race to people or just can't be bothered changing it. This article is a solution looking for a problem.
- Asian here. If a white guy came to me and gave me some 20 minute analysis on why white emojis are racist so that’s why he doesn’t use them, I will assume he’s a trust fund neoliberal and advocates for genocide in third world countries. I am not kidding. Take that as you will
  
  That would be excessive, but everything we do sends a message so it's reasonable to consider how the message might be interpreted. What do you think when you see a yellow emoji without a 20 minute unprompted analysis?
- When i used slack for work it like automatically collected the different skin tones together
  
  yeah it does that now but didn't when they first released the skin color emoji. They added grouping in 2021

Average radlib Mastodon take
"I, [Server Admin], have banned you because your bio says you are white but you racistly chose to racistly use the default racist yellow thumbs up emoji. You have done real racist harm to our community with your racism and must be held accountable, you bigot. Yes, this is praxis and I am protecting the marginalized."
- But your honour, my liver failure and resulting jaundice has in fact left me bright yellow.

My base skin color is 👍🏻 but my hands are somewhere between 👍🏼 and 👍🏽
Basically, I’m doomed to use ✅

- /r/blackpeopletwitter (?) asked for photographic verification at some point to deal with the racist KKKrakas. The rest of
  got predictably mald.

But yellow is the default...I have to go out of my way to use the other ones because my keyboard's auto complete just fills this in with no other option
- Just make the default skin tone white instead of yellow. It’ll be right for the majority of users anyway
  
  🤣🤣🤣😭💀
  
  Ok hitler

It's times like these that I'm thankful to be from an older generation with no need for emojis beyond :) and :(
- Have you considered :|
  
  or :/
- Welcome to the Unicode era ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
  
  :(

Meanwhile, people are hungry and can't feed their kids and the planet is choking
- Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic

It has nothing to do with racism. They are just dads

Also known as the Simpsonian negation.

Nationalist Public Radio is just soy nazi propaganda for Ted Lasso watching corpo radlibs lol

I remember making fun of conservatives for obsessing over such a mundane update to iOS, as if Tim apple has every engineer working on black emojis. But now, liberals have fallen for the same shit. Horseshoe theory strikes again
- as if Tim apple has every engineer working on black emojis
  "Just one more thing... we've had the entire Apple staff travel to Africa with calipers and spectrometers to scientifically determine the perfect average black emoji."
  
  They wouldn't be using calipers to measure any bones right?

Where is pasty white? My people are not represented
- We have that, but only for the default smiley face:
  
  I'm paper white thank you, this is more accurate
- Or how about glowstick white?
  
  Fr whenever I get hit by light I look like an elf from lotr with all the excessive bloom I give off
  Makes taking pictures a nightmare

This is the most ridiculous thing I've seen this year 😂😭💀

I like my emojis Bart Simpson colored

either get rid of the yellow one or just have one and make it blue or something then
- blue lives don't, in fact, matter
- Shiva likey

Yes I'm opting out. If I could opt out of being white I could. I don't need to advertise that I'm pale.

Person with Jaundice
"What am I? Nothing to you?"

I genuinely thought the cultural consensus was that smiley faces are yellow -> emoji derive from smiley faces therefore emojis are yellow
This person has no life npr is so god damn lame
The real pronlem is that cats are only one color
- REAL AND BASED. We need more cat emojis frfr