Erickson: Those Obsessing Over the Race of Texting Emojis Are Uniquely Parasitic
In 2018, researchers at the University of Edinburgh published a study looking at the use of race-based emojis, the digital characters people use in texting.
For a long time, emojis were all uniformly yellow. In 2015, software updates across platforms allowed individuals to choose one of five skin tones in addition to the default yellow.
It is important to get the timeline right here. The emoji changes came in 2015. The Atlantic published a short piece in 2016 on white people sticking with the yellow default. The Edinburgh research study came in 2018. NPR, which bragged about ignoring the Hunter Biden story in 2020, only just decided to report on the 2018 research and linked to the 2016 Atlantic piece. Perhaps sometime in 2040 it will get around to reporting on Hunter’s deals with China and his use of crack cocaine.
According to NPR, “some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don’t want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text, or to take advantage of something that was created to represent diversity.”
The entirety of NPR’s story and the original research is the height of self-centered ridiculousness.
The presumption in the piece is that non-white people have embraced the use of racial emojis. Ironically, in the actual study, researchers noted that “T6,” the darkest skin tone, is the least used emoji color, even in African nations. Also, the U.S. has the most even distribution between skin tones. It is important to note that the researchers only used Twitter, so they have no idea how many people use race-based emojis in their private text messages. Most importantly, most people still use the default yellow, regardless of race.
The kind of people who obsess over race-based emojis are uniquely parasitic. They glom on to the outrage machine and find racial issues wherever they can. Based on their own biases and presuppositions, they assume everyone must care as much about race as they do and conclude that choosing to stick to a default emoji color is an assertion of privilege. It could be that most people do not care.
Unfortunately, to say people do not care is, to America’s parasitic racial grifters, also an assertion of privilege. It is an unfalsifiable notion that only people who care deeply about race believe. But not only do they believe it, they expect everyone else to believe it too. They have invaded every aspect of society and polluted major media outlets with a race obsession not seen outside Alabama in the mid-1960s.
These neo-racists who see race everywhere, obsess over race and condemn those not obsessed with race are the very same people who tend to oppose allowing black children to leave public schools. They are the same people who push critical race theory in schools to teach minority students that they are oppressed and that white students are oppressors. Instead of seeking racial reconciliation, they seek division. Without the division, they could not profit nor generate silly clickbait.
In 2020, NPR not only bragged about refusing to cover the Hunter Biden story, but the network also criticized those outlets that did choose to cover it. The story turned out to be true.
Two years later, NPR can find the time to engage in racial grifting off a 4-year-old story. Why must my tax dollars pay for NPR’s racial obsessions?
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