just learned with horror that deleting any of the "family" emojis in google slides does not remove the emoji, but rather kills off each individual family member one by one, starting with the children
The soundcloud: aclu.org/donate. I DARE y’all to give so much money to the ACLU that my data team has to do an analysis of the “emojicide bump”
As many folks have pointed out, families are not the only compound emojis. Skin tone and gender are also often tacked on as an afterthought to other atomic emoji forms.
The way the unicode is implemented in platforms like Google docs leads to many kinds of horror movie fodder. If you want to remove the emoji of a Black woman running from a Google doc, you have to first delete her gender, and then delete her Blackness.
What's telling is not only the emojis are made this way, but the ones that aren't. For example, the only family emoji that behaves as a single character is the hetero couple with one male child. They get got as a unit. Here's a side-by-side:
Similarly, the straight couple kissing and the gay couple kissing appear exactly the same at first glance. But when you break them down to their component parts, 👨❤️💋👨 is actually 👨 + ❤️ + 💋 + 👨, while the straights get to stay a unit.
Most of the athletes are, at their base level, men (except the yoga lady, of course🧘🏿♀️). The profession emojis (👩🏿🍳, 👨🏽⚖️, 👩🏼🔧) seem mostly to be implemented in the same way for both genders, but guess who is, atomically, a lady? The witch. And the vampire. (The mermaid is a man.)
None of this should be surprising. Emojis are language, language reflects society, and our society is dominated by white heteronormative gender binaries. Bias is encoded into technology at every level, & everyone who works in technology has a responsibility to ACTIVELY combat it.
