Skin Tone Emojis on Zoom: a reflection on white (or yellow) as the default

Now that we are all spending so much time on Zoom, we are probably all a little more invested in the emoji game than we were in March. I'm constantly using the Zoom thumb's up and clapping hands to try to transcend the digital void between me and whoever is speaking (since I know first hand how hard it is to read the digital room when I am teaching). 

When I was setting up my Zoom account in March, I noticed the setting for skin tone reactions. I thought about it briefly, but took the easy way out and left it on the default "Simpsons-yellow".

Recently, I've noticed more of my colleagues using the various shades of not Lisa Simpson and started to think more about why I bailed on making a choice back in March.

Part of it has to do with whiteness. I knew this intellectually, of course, in part because I teach about these issues. But I was also using my privilege to decide not to think about my race in the midst of setting up for distance learning at the outset of a pandemic. For those of us who grew up white (or at least looking pretty white) we are used to being the default when it comes to race. We are able to see race as what deviates from that default, not as a category that equally describes us. It generally makes us deeply uncomfortable to think about what it means to be white or what whiteness even is. Here is a  great short piece in Time Magazine by Savala Trepczynski, Executive Director of the Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law explaining a little about this. This conversation about skin tone emojis is not new and has been actively discussed and debated since they first came out in 2015. In fact, prior to 2015 the default was actually white skin tone, not the "safer" Simpsons yellow.

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This article in the Atlantic gets at some of the reasons why white people are reluctant to use the lighter skin tone emojis. And this article from NPR's Code Switch talks about why we shouldn't (even in solidarity) use the darker emojis. 

So, bottom line, sometime last week (I don't recall specifically when) I went into the general settings page of my Zoom account and made the choice to acknowledge the whiteness that lets me not think about race all the time. 

I did, just as an FYI, choose the slightly darker white skin tone as someone who is half Egyptian and because it reminded me of an early memory of talking to my mother about race when I was a child. I came home from school confused because I didn't know if I was supposed to call myself white on the standardized test I took that day. Ultimately, my mother told me, yes, the category white (or as we called it in the 80's Caucasian), definitionally included people from the Middle East. Although, she said, you're really more of a beige. I don't share this to try to force anyone to change their Zoom settings or imply that such a single action is necessarily even meaningful or helpful, but rather to share my own personal and continuing journey to think about all these complex issues. And also because my Race, Class, and Gender elective ended Monday and if I was teaching them today, this would probably be part of my lesson plan. Thanks for reading,  Laila