You may not give it much thought, but you have an online presence - a digital doppelganger, if you will. Whether you’re on message boards, social media or just texting friends, that identity comes through to the people you’re interacting with. And if you base your identity on how you see yourself or more the way you want others to think of you, a part of that perception comes from the language you use.
But language is more than just words. Just as your in-person conversations consist of speech and non-verbal cues like your body language, emojis add important nuance and emotional emphasis to our daily digital interactions. A single image can convey a whole sentence and express “feeling better” than you could with words alone. Consider how many times you use something like 😂 instead of saying, “That’s funny!” Over the last decade emojis have become second nature for us to use in our digital interactions.
The Language of Identity
Emojis have a longer history than you might expect. They trace their origins back to 1962 and one company’s attempt to create a cheerful image to boost employee morale with the original smiley face. The bright yellow that began as a simple color choice to convey a cheerful smile quickly became the de facto skin tone for everyone, despite the fact that it didn’t represent most of the world’s population. From Legos to The Simpsons, yellow has since been reinforced as the equivalent of “whiteness.” It’s no wonder it carried over into the digital space as texting and online messaging took off, with only one choice to represent a whole host of identities.
This white washing - or yellow washing - finally began to change incrementally. Beginning in 2003 with an NBA licensing deal, Lego slowly began to adopt colors other than the standard yellow for its faces, though 89% are still white or yellow.
But in the digital space, yellow was all we had until 2015, when an enterprising BIPOC woman named Katrina Parrott developed an iPhone app to allow users to paste diverse emojis into their conversations.
Finally, digital identify is beginning to catch up to our physical identities. However, there are still hurdles to overcome, such as non-European hairstyles and facial features that better represent the diversity of the human family, including gender identity and different abilities. But it’s a good start.
Choosing How to Represent Ourselves
Even with such a diverse set of emojis at our literal fingertips, today we face a new challenge. How should we represent ourselves in our online conversations? If you’re giving a high five and don’t want to share your skin color, which emoji do you choose? If you’re white, should you use white emojis, or does it come across as being proud of your ethnicity? There is a whole new set of considerations.
To navigate the new “emojiscape,” I boil it down to three simple rules.
Avoid emojis that make you or others uncomfortable. The Anti-Racism Daily notes that using emojis representing a race you don’t belong to could be considered the equivalent of digital blackface, especially if you’re adopting a racial identity for your own advantage. Similarly, if you’re white and would prefer not to highlight it as strongly, perhaps the traditional yellow is right.
Be inclusive of your audience. If you’re part of a diverse group, consider using more than one color of emoji. 👋👋🏻👋🏼👋🏽👋🏾👋🏿
Find your truth. If you want to acknowledge your heritage and all it represents, including being white, go with what works for you. Or you might avoid the issue altogether, choosing emojis like 💯 to show encouragement rather than a high five or other emojis that include a skin tone.
It’s a privilege to live in a society where we have so many ways to communicate with others around the world. And as we carefully think about how we represent ourselves in the digital space, we can use emojis that maintain our identity in a way that is inclusive and welcoming to others.
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