What would life be like without our emojis? I know mine would be exceptionally boring, but has it ever occurred to you that our emojis may be normalizing our bias behavior?
It didn’t cross my mind until Apple came out with the iOS 8.3 update, which added 300 new emojis.
This update, which includes a variety of ethnically diverse emojis and same-sex couples, has been long-awaited. After many people reached out on social media and signed online petitions expressing an interest for more multicultural emojis,
Apple is delivering.
As someone who had been actively following the release of this update, I was very pleased to see the new emoji keyboard. And if you haven’t updated your iPhone yet, you are seriously missing out.
There are some noteworthy changes in the addition to the emojis keyboard — including faces with five different skin tones to choose from, 14 couples, 10 of which are now same same-sex families with a variety of offspring, and five different skin tones for the variety of hand symbols as well.
And instead of Apple using the “white” emoji characters as the default for all emojis, they have now switched all of the faces and hand signs to the most basic, non-human yellow that is used for the smiley face emojis.
Apple’s emojis are based on a Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed across a variety of platforms. Because of this, when Apple was developing new ethnically diverse emojis, it had to work closely with the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization that is devoted to developing the integration of text in all modern software products.
This process wasn’t a walk in the park for Apple, which is why it has taken a little over a year to finalize these changes in the new software update.
Some people feel these diverse emojis have made matters worse because people have recently been using the colored emojis to make pejorative statements to people of color and different sexual orientations. I certainly disagree.
But in all honesty, I feel people will always find anything that is racially, culturally or sexually diverse politically incorrect. Nevertheless, these diverse emojis are a step in the right direction, especially for our future generations. For children growing up, they now don’t have to be faced with the ever so daunting question, “Why is white skin always the default?”
Now it isn’t, and props to Apple for being racially inclusive.
But the variety of hues are not the only thing Apple included in this update. They also included same-sex families with children that are not gender exclusive, as in not only male or female children.
In 2012, Apple introduced the same-sex couple emojis. But it was only a matter of time until the same-sex couples emojis included same-sex families with a single male or female child, both a male and female child, two male or two female children. And the sports emojis are also diversified too.
The update didn’t just cover the human diversity element with racially diverse face emojis and same-sex families, but they also have included dozens of new flags in the update as well.
There are now 285 diverse people emojis to pick from, with 14 new families, 60 updated people and 198 new flags in the update, so people have a variety of
options to pick from.
But this update to the emoji keyboard isn’t just an addition with a bunch of fun new colors to pick from. White people are no longer the default, and people of color are no longer being erased from our culture — if you want to pick a “I’m getting my haircut, look how fabulous I am” emoji in a darker hue, you can. Or if you want to use a family emoji, you now have the option to pick one with two dads or two moms because we are making this all part of the norm.
Our emoji keyboard is redefining how we express family, races and cultures on our mobile devices. And as subtle as it may seem to some, this update to our emojis has some real-world benefits.
If that isn’t revolutionary, I’m not sure what is.
Jen Blate is a 24-year-old sociology junior from Miami, Florida. Jen can be reached on Twitter @Jblate_TDR.
