“In an effort to better represent society, Apple has revealed a new set of globally diverse emoji that will come in six different skin tones,” Ellie Zolfagharifard reports for The Daily Mail. “The tones include an option that turns a character yellow – a shade that the the Cupertino-based company says it intended to be ethnically neutral.”
“But the colour has angered some Apple users, particularly those in China, who claim that the yellow tone is offensive to Asians,” Zolfagharifard reports. “Many took to Twitter to voice their concerns with one user, Jade Tran, writing: ‘Is the yellow emoji suppose to represent Asians because I have never in my life seen an Asian lookin like that.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Those emoji are meant for those suffering from Jaundice, silly. Apple is mucho inclusive, dontcha know?
“The move could damage Apple’s reputation in one of its leading markets. The group doubled its sales in China last year, while Samsung has been losing market share,” Zolfagharifard reports. “The new emoj are being trialled on OS X 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3 beta 2.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
American Indians… sorry, Native Amercians reportedly replied, “Hey, you Asians, at least you got some emoji.”
Everybody’s aggrieved. Sheesh.
Some people really need to
lighten the fsck up… oops, relax.In closing: Go Redskins!
(We’re really Dolphins fans. Great, now here comes PETA!)
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Related article:
Apple to deliver new racially diverse emoji – February 23, 2015
The Simpsons are happy though!
Racist?
They are mad when they are white, they are mad when they are yellow. Just not pleasing some folk.
Get over it my Little Yellow Friends.
I have never seen a WHITE emoji. As far as I can tell, they are pinkish beige or brownish or yellowish but NOT WHITE. Even albinos aren’t quite WHITE.
Get over it! The amount of pigment in someone’s skin does not create or destroy their character.
Sadly, it does for some other people…
Considering the first emoji font was created in JAPAN, I don’t think there is much to complain about yellow emojis being racist. Plus, the “Have a Nice Day” happy face icon has been yellow for decades.
Sorry, Native Americans…
Aren’t they originally Asian?
If Asians are unhappy, perhaps they self-identify with yellow e-mojis. After all, Apple never said yellow meant Asian.
No, the original DoCoMo emojis were 12×12 pixel black and white bitmaps that had no race, although many of the symbols were reflective of Asian culture. There were far fewer emojis back then as well… 176, before Apple submitted more to the Unicode consortium. We now have 722 with more being proposed in Unicode 8.
You’re right though, the yellow are supposed to represent “Simpson’s yellow” and no race whatsoever.
Likewise, they’re being used that way.
I’ve always been offended by the smilies… All yellow. Now they get full emoji. And I’m still not seeing the white smilies.
Some people look for reasons to be offended.
This is so ridiculous. People are just way too sensitive nowadays. All the political correctness has reached a point where much of it is just downright stupid.
Dude, it’s an animation. Get over it!
Fascinating – no mention of the emoji that looks like a penis with balls, next to the lipstick mouth. At least the eyeballs are looking away……
“Some Asians” need to take a chill pill.
Oh jeez. They mean the “some Asians” who were told that they should be offended by this. This is stupid ass bullshit.
I kind of assumed yellow was for Asians as well… But when I see it in that image, I see the yellow is a smiley face yellow; makes sense as neutral, I suppose.
I guess the Wal Mart logo has been pissing off asians for years.
It seems everyone has a different slant on the issue.
Re: the MDN take, “lighten up”? —About an issue of skin colour?
Racism!
Many people just look for reasons to be offended.
Makes me want to help them out…
while some people certainly wake up in the morning looking for something to complain about, this issue is a little deeper than just dismissing it as having your panties in a bunch. there is no reason whatsoever to characterize any race by color. red, black, white, yellow. these come from a day when differentiation was economic and social security. the world, for the most part, and certainly in the developed countries, has moved forward from that protective posture. some people are still not completely inclusive, but they will after a few more generations.
apple as a corporate entity should recognize this. it is not just a case of the emoji’s being fun. dismissing this lack of sensitivity as fun or funny, just shows how much lack of sensitivity it really there. a quick fix would be to include emoji’s that are colors which do not have a racial connotation, like fuchsia. that way they won’t be railroaded by the PC crowd into removing the brown and yellow ones and remove the need to add red ones.
from the another perspective, an asian who is truly developed as a part of today’s modern society should react to the yellow faces with, “who are those people?” and not associate with the antiquated reference. something they teach you in the CCW class is while you may be packing, the best gunfight you can have is the one you don’t get into.
Me so emoji! Text you long time, Joe!
Has anyone considered that “some Asians” could be the same agitators that are on the payroll of the Chinese government, which continues its efforts to malign Apple, whenever it can?
This reeks of yet mother cn.gov smear campaign.
While you might be scratching your head over why Asians are up in arms about the “yellow emoji” which has been around forever, consider that this is coming from China, so you must question how this was spun in the Chinese media, how the headlines about this read.
A duck swimming in a pond might read, “Local duck jumps into park pond.” or “Duck causes waves by polluting local park pond”
😄😃😀😊☺️☺️😉😝😛😳😁
seems I have been using yellow emojis for years.
The only Asians offended by this are the ones employed by Samsung.
All through my childhood I had no idea that all of my LEGO “men” were Asian!!
Now, I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because police officers call me “sir”.
– Stephen Colbert
Christ, do people have anything to better to do than complain (which I wouldn’t even mind if it weren’t more often than not about some pretty silly stuff)?
Besides, how is Apple supposed to differentiate different types of people–I am deliberately not using the word ‘race.’ There’s no evidence that it’s anything more than a divisive term used to separate people based on pretty meaningless categories, such as skin color, with no basis in fact.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t because everyone knows that if Apple had created Emoji to represent Asian people and made them the same color as whites–just changing the shape of their eyes–there’d be complaints as well.
nothing here
Lived in Asia for years.
Doubt if many of them are offended by that, they are not very sensitive to these things, look at all the cartoony figures Japanese use for mascots (banks use funny creatures to represent their customers etc). (Even in USA seldom see Asians protesting some racial equality issue).
What I do know is that their businessmen are VERY concerned about money , this probably a ploy raked up by the Asian smartphone companies that are hurting (Apple takes 90% of the smartphone profits in the world).
Probably paid ‘PR’ companies to saturate the blogs, newspaper letters etc with complaints. Samsung has been fined in Asia for such tactics.
My first thought when I saw them yesterday was that they were too yellow.
Just hire some Asian artist to design them or just look at what Asian phone makers use to represent themselves, and make something like that.
It’s no big deal, It’s software. Just change it.
No one complained when Bruce Springsteen sang about the “yellow” man back in ’84. Why all the ruckus now? What a pansy-ass society America has become.
Well looks like they dont any other problems in their lives, that shd be good.. Oh wait.. they are troubled by emoji..That is catastrophic..Geez
So the idiocy continues. It was just a Japanese color vector font. Now it’s a political-socio-religious INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT. It was better left alone as it was. (^_^)
The Petition to Make Emoji Less Racist (O_o)
Still no shark. Still no waterskier. I think I’ll go mental. 😛
…I’ve been attempting to post a link to an article with a history of emoji. But WordPress is experiencing seizures tonight. Or maybe it’s having a hissy fit over wanting it’s own emoji.