Notices by Jeremy Burge (jeremyburge@mastodon.world)

Different approach between vendors on this: Apple is making all the older family emojis gender neutral, while Google has kept the gendered options showing different hairstyles for each person.

What is consistent is the commitment to replacing any and all family options with silhouettes https://blog.emojipedia.org/googles-emoji-15-1-support-in-noto-color-emoji/

Redesigned family emojis are here. The old ones? Close enough for white families to find useful, but useless for black families. The new ones? Equally useless for everyone.
https://www.mobiletechjournal.com/the-family-emojis-are-now-equally-useless-for-everyone/

Previous decisions considered that as yellow emojis are intended to be neutral or 'non-human', it wasn’t deliberately exclusionary having no black families. Because theoretically there weren't white families either. Only yellow.

But given studies show how white people use the yellow / default emojis at higher rates than those with darker skin, the family emoji situation was left favouring light-skinned families until now. From 2020: https://blog.emojipedia.org/on-families-and-equality/

I’m posting this because I don’t want our black and brown friends having to defend this online. Some will care about this, and some won’t. But there has always been a contingent of folks online who insist on belittling any group that asks for better emoji representation.

If you are a white family that misses the older yellow family emojis; that effectively demonstrates what black people had been missing all these years.

This is absolutely the right call. Apple’s focus - when it comes to transportation - should be on modes that make cities move efficiently: walking, bikes, e-bikes, public transport https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/27/apple-cancels-apple-car-project-moves-team-to-generative-ai-projects/