Taxpayer-Supported "Journalistic" Endeavor NPR: When You Use the Default Yellowish Thumbs Up Emoji, You're Committing a Micro-Aggression

And/or engaging in a complicated, nuanced discourse with privilege and race you probably aren't aware of.

Pay attention, plebes. You're being forced to pay for this -- and the GOP leadership class that "represents you" have continued forcing you to pay for this travesty because their trash wives like listening to NPR on their way back home from the alleged "yoga studios" but in fact on the way back home from their boyfriends' pads.

BTW, their wives aren't trash because they're cheating on them. I'd cheat on these shriveled weakling pallid wrinkled molemen grifters, too. Their wives are trash because they're trash. They see Nancy Pelosi in her daily 4pm alcoholic stupor and think, "You go, Girlbosshhh. You teach that White Zinf who'shhh bosssh."

Heath Racela identifies as three-quarters white and one-quarter Filipino. When texting, he chooses a yellow emoji instead of a skin tone option, because he feels it doesn't represent any specific ethnicity or color.

He doesn't want people to view his texts in a particular way. He wants to go with what he sees as the neutral option and focus on the message.

"I present as very pale, very light skinned. And if I use the white emoji, I feel like I'm betraying the part of myself that's Filipino," Racela, of Littleton, Mass., said. "But if I use a darker color emoji, which maybe more closely matches what I see when I look at my whole family, it's not what the world sees, and people tend to judge that."

In 2015, five skin tone options became available for hand gesture emojis, in addition to the default Simpsons-like yellow. Choosing one can be a simple texting shortcut for some, but for others it opens a complex conversation about race and identity.

"I use the brown one that matches me," said Sarai Cole, an opera singer in Germany. "I have some friends who use the brown ones, too, but they are not brown themselves. This confuses me."

Cole is originally from California and identifies as Black and an American Descendant of Slavery. She said that while she was not offended when a non-brown friend used a dark emoji, she would like to understand why.

"I think it would be nice if it is their default, but if they're just using it with me or other brown people, I would want to look into that deeper and know why they're doing that," she said.

Jennifer Epperson, from Houston, identifies as Black and said she changed her approach depending on who she was talking to.

"I use the default emoji, the yellow-toned one for professional settings, and then I use the dark brown emoji for friends and family," she said. "I just don't have the emotional capacity to unpack race relations in the professional setting."

Is the yellow emoji really neutral?

A 2018 study published by the University of Edinburgh looked at the use of different skin tone emojis -- what it referred to as "modified" emojis -- on Twitter to find out if the modifiers contributed to self-representation.

Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google and Ph.D. candidate involved in the study, said the emoji modifiers were used widely but it was people with darker skin who used them in higher proportions, and more often.

Maybe that's because race has been turned into a racist cult by the leadership class of minorities.

After another look at Twitter data, Andrew McGill, then writer for The Atlantic, found that 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.

Perhaps, like Heath Racela, they simply don't want to think about how their message could be interpreted.

But Zara Rahman, a researcher and writer in Berlin, argues that the skin tone emojis make white people confront their race as people of color often have to do. For example, she shared Sarai Cole's confusion when someone who is white uses a brown emoji, so she asked some friends about it.

"One friend who is white told me that it was because he felt that white people were overrepresented in the space that he was using the emoji, so he wanted to kind of try and even the playing field," Rahman said. "For me, it does signal a kind of a lack of awareness of your white privilege in many ways."

So white people are damned if they try to increase "black representation" through emojis, and they're damned if they use the default yellow emoji, because that allows them to escape a confrontation with their white privilge.

And if they use a white thumbs up, well: That's an assertion of their white privilege, and that damns them most of all.

So white people are bad no matter what they do.

Haven't I read this same article 53 million times in the past eight years?

Hey, overpaid privileged Karens: What are the racial implications of this emoji?

Is it legal to extract money from taxpayers and continue using it for explicitly demeaning race propaganda?

Tucker noticed that NPR has had a "representation" push lately -- only in the lower ranks, of course; the white Boomers all get to keep their jobs, it's only the younger whites who get replaced by minorities.

Funny how that always seems to work!

Anyway, he noticed that this push for representation in hiring was accompanied by a push for "representation" in stories.

Every other story, he noticed, found a way to be about a race.

Especially in the area of dieting.

Dieting is racist (duh, everything is) and reifies white supremacy (duh, again).

And then a week later -- NPR was back to again explore the racism inherent in dieting.

So what I'm hearing is that all of NPR's recent hires are 1, female, 2, minority, 3, obsessed with the most trivial matters of Twitter, 4, morbidly obese, and 5, not coping with that very well.

In an interview with Matt Taibbi, veteran journalist Walter Kirn said that a big difference between old school journalists and today's "journalists" is that today's "journalists" barely ever leave their computer screens.* They don't go anywhere to get a story, they don't go to the morgue or library to read documents, they don't even pick up a phone to call a contact.

Everything with them is just what they see on twitter.

And you know what you see on Twitter...?

That's right, Thumb's Up emojis.

Bang. There's a story!

Notice it takes three "journalists" to report this out. Three. It took three world-beater Millennial SJWs to break EmojiGate.

And the GOP will keep on funding this, forever.

* He said:

Most journalism now is about other journalism. Most journalism now is internecine warfare between the so-called legacy and prestige outlets, and all their competitors, which are accused of being everything from in the pockets of Vladimir Putin to insurrectionists. The hunt for disinformation and misinformation is now almost the whole of the job. In fact, from what I've seen, 98% of journalism is committed without ever leaving the laptop screen.

That's one of the openings for these whopper stories about the real America, which they only visit when they go to the Iowa caucuses. Everybody thinks that because they went to a diner during a presidential primary, that they know the heartbeat of grassroots America.

He noted that the stupidest viral disinformation the "mainstream" media pumps out, like patients dying in line at hospitals when a simple phone call reveals that they are below capacity, is due to the fact that these idiots literally just think that if they saw it on Twitter, it's true, and the concept of physically going somewhere to check its veracity seems primitive and crude and dirty to them.

One of the reasons they can tell so many stories so inaccurately about people in places that they aren’t is that they don't even have a fact-check in memory about being to of those places, let alone a friend who lives there. So they can expect from their audience total incuriosity about the truth. So you get a spiral of reaffirmation that becomes almost completely detached from reality and journalism.

But we're really going to keep paying for this kind of repulsive Nazi-esque race propaganda "journalism" because the GOP is garbage and a Vichy occupying force.

posted by Ace at 05:08 PM

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