No, the new yellow-faced human emoji aren't racist. Here's why
However, as pictures of the upcoming characters spread, some people weren't happy about the new yellow-faced human emoji. To many people, it seemed like the yellow emoji were supposed to represent an Asian skin tone.
As the Daily Mail's headline puts it: "Asians angered by Apple's 'racist' yellow emoji."
No need to cast Apple or Unicode, the consortium that makes emoji, as racist though: That yellow emoji isn't meant to look Asian.
iMore editor Renee Ritchie explains:
Now that the human emoji will have different possible skin tones, you'll be able to choose which one you want by touching and holding each emoji and selecting from the different options. The yellow color is just the neutral default - the same color as the race-less smiley-face emoji - and doesn't represent a skin color.
"Bright yellow as the default made no sense if it was meant to represent a skin tone," Ritchie wrote in an email. "No single skin tone would make sense if diversity was the goal."
Indeed, in the Unicode report where it discussed creating more diverse emoji, it said that it would base skin tones off of the "Fitzpatrick scale," a recognized standard for dermatology.
The yellow color that Unicode uses for the smiley-face emoji - and that will become the new default color for the human emoji - isn't on the Fitzpatrick scale. It's a "more generic (inhuman) appearance."
Here's a look at the default yellow color compared to the five Fitzpatrick scale colors the new emoji will use:
