Communications of the ACM
Emoji Reveal Whiteness as Driver of Technology
Research from the University of Alabama found that emoji continue to center whiteness in their design and coding structures.
Credit: Amelia Holowaty Krales/The Verge
A study from the University of Alabama (UA) that investigated the inclusion of skin-tone modifiers in emoji sets demonstrated that whiteness remains the core of emoji design and coding structures.
The researchers integrated an interface analysis of emoji skin-tone modifiers with user discourse analysis.
Original human-character emojis had a light skin tone, which was switched to yellow following issues raised by people of color; a range of human skin tones based on a dermatological scale of skin tones later followed the emoji set's incorporation into the Unicode Consortium.
UA's Miriam E. Sweeney said the skin-tone modifiers were overlaid atop the base emoji characters, retaining their foundational whiteness.
Sweeney said, "For a lot of our technologies there is an ideal user imagined, and these skin-tone modifiers created a moment of rupture for those users ... who suddenly were made aware of race in an interface that had previously seemed raceless to them."
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