Are Emoji racist? It’s been a topic of conversation for a long time but now it seems that operating systems are about to add a whole new range of multi-cultural emoji.
Emoji are most commonly used on smartphones and have been growing in popularity especially as more and more messaging apps hit the market.
The debate has been made however, that the current selection of Emoji available on most devices lack ethnic diversity and are mainly all white.
Despite the current “white people” trend on Emoji, the concept was actually based on Japanese carrier images which were then standardized in 2010 by the Unicode Consortium.
The Emoji have received very few updates since then but probably the biggest mention was an addition of homosexual emoji’s back in 2012. Even then, no multi-cultural emoji were added.
The Consortium have now published a draft proposal to ensure that both Google and Apple offer a range of skin tones for their Emoji.
Yes, it seems to be all quite official when it comes to the race of the Emoji.
The new black, olive and tanned emoji’s are apparently a “work in progress” but will be available soon.