Related to the graphic, but unrelated to the unicode angle: I have a colleague who was in communications for her organization (not even a tech company). She told me about the time they used a stock photo of a racially-ambiguous (not white, not black, but could be interpreted as mixed race, asian, hispanic, middle-eastern, etc) hand checking a box for a "Make sure you vote!" campaign last year, and they got a lot of flak for not explicitly making the hand black--literally some people were saying they felt that the message was explicitly excluding them or that they couldn't relate to it because the skin tone didn't match theirs. They made sure the hand was a female hand because they had previously gotten flak for that.
I think about that a lot when I look at corporate messaging like this. These days a lot of effort is put into making sure the content doesn't offend people who hold strongly to beliefs about race and gender--something that I might not be so aware of if I hadn't had her inside perspective. I wonder what kind of conversations must be had inside Apple's communications team about the "identities" of these avatars.
I'm sure some people will downvote this into oblivion (and fair enough--race and gender have been breathlessly promoted for the last 5+ years and some people are understandably fatigued of the topic), but I think trends about race and gender are interesting and maybe others will appreciate this anecdote.
I think that if you get downvoted, it might be because it's not related to the parent comment (which is only talking about the unicode angle). You should make this a top-level comment!
It's a real breakdown of empathy. People only see skin color for their interpretation of "like me". There is so much to being a person, but this is the first thing people see, so it becomes insanely overrepresented.
Agreed. This brings to mind a couple of other anecdotes:
* The Dutch translator who was hired to translate Amanda Gorman's work (AG is the youngest poet laureate in US history and while I'm not particularly informed on poetry, I liked her performance at the Biden inauguration). The deal was reneged because of significant complaints that the translator wasn't black and thus couldn't possibly understand Gorman (a black person) and thus couldn't possibly convey her sentiments. The translator noted that he was deemed fit to translate Shakespeare despite not being neither an Englishman nor alive during the 16th century, so the implication seems to be that race constitutes a greater distinction between humans than nationality and centuries of history.
* The San Francisco school board affair in which a gay white man was deemed unfit to serve as a volunteer because, despite being eminently qualified and having the support of the broader community, he was "redundant" in that there were already several white female volunteers. In this case, the explicit reasoning of the school board was that the candidate volunteer wouldn't be able to relate to students of color and thus wouldn't be fit to serve them. The implication seems to be that students would be better served by a volunteer their own race (irrespective of the experiences or qualifications of said volunteer) rather than someone who was qualified and perhaps had relatable experiences but of a different race.
> There is so much to being a person, but this is the first thing people see, so it becomes insanely overrepresented.
Perhaps, but skin tone differences have always existed, and this sort of emphasis on skin tone seems like a very recent phenomenon at least in the scope of my lifetime.
> The San Francisco school board affair in which a gay white man was deemed unfit to serve as a volunteer because [...] he was "redundant" in that there were already several white female volunteers.
That's kinda homophobic. Gay man so he HAS to be effeminate.
> The implication seems to be that students would be better served by a volunteer their own race
I bet the (closeted) students (of all races) would have probably preferred to see an openly gay man in a position of authority where he's not mocked for who is is.
> That's kinda homophobic. Gay man so he HAS to be effeminate.
FWIW, I didn't interpret it that way. I think the school board's message was merely that race dominates all other qualifications and since they already had two other white people (who happened to be female) they already had enough people with "white qualifications". Of course, this is by no means a less toxic interpretation than your "homophobia" interpretation.
> this sort of emphasis on skin tone seems like a very recent phenomenon at least in the scope of my lifetime.
This sounds like something that could only be true of a white person. It reminds of me of how I was horrified to learn that one of my gay friends had to deal with someone calling them the F slur once, and my friend said I was only surprised because I don't personally deal with homophobic slurs on a regular basis.
There has always been extraordinary emphasis on skin tone, it's just that more and more non-POC folks are starting to see it bit by bit.
> There has always been extraordinary emphasis on skin tone
No doubt this is true in some strict sense depending on how you define "extraordinary", but in whatever sense this is true I don't think it's very informative. Namely, while (esp in the US) there is a deep history of racism, to say that it has always been this way is pretty much untrue--American views on race (including the importance placed on race) have changed a lot throughout history, and while racism has never utterly disappeared, it's perfectly correct to note that the emphasis placed on race in the 90s and 2000s was much lower than the most recent decade.
Indeed, Google NGram corroborates this. Note the date range is 1990-2019 because ngram doesn't offer 2020 or 2021 data--though I strongly suspect the upward trend continues in 2020. Note also that I used "americans" as a suffix in all cases to disambiguate "white" and "black" which come up in a lot of non-racial contexts.
So I don't really buy into the "we've always been this obsessed about race; whites are just mysteriously unable to perceive it" argument. In general, people are often surprised that the variation within a race far exceeds the variation between races, and specifically that "people of color" do not have the views (on race or otherwise) ascribed to them by the popular media.
People writing about race more does not mean that race is necessarily playing a larger role in the various operations of society, it just means the myriad ways it affects society are being discussed more.
Race has always played this large a role, people just say it in books more. Our subconscious biases can reign supreme and yet never be discussed anywhere.
EDIT: There is also nothing mysterious about white people having a much harder time picking up on racism. You're making it seem like this mystical hippy-dippy nonsense. It's instead very simple: if you're white you won't often (ever) be the target of racism, so you'll have a skewed perception of how common and powerful it is. No mystery here, friend.
> People writing about race more does not mean that race is necessarily playing a larger role in the various operations of society, it just means the myriad ways it affects society are being discussed more.
Indeed, ngram isn’t conclusive proof that our society (or rather, certain elements there within) are race obsessed. But my claim is only that certain elements of society have become possessed by race, not that they have succeeded in restructuring society according to their segregationist designs.
> Race has always played this large a role, people just say it in books more.
I don’t think there’s any evidence for that, and there’s significant evidence that the role race plays has gone down considerably (we don’t have expressly racist policies like we did in the 60s and earlier, we don’t tolerate racist memes in the entertainment media, being perceived as a racist is the among the worst social offenses, etc). Note that there is no dichotomy between advocating for further progress and acknowledging the progress that has been made.
> Our subconscious biases can reign supreme and yet never be discussed anywhere.
And yet the evidence for subconscious bias is virtually nil. The implicit association test, long hailed to be proof of subconscious bias, turns out to be bunk and little additional evidence exists.
> There is also nothing mysterious about white people having a much harder time picking up on racism. You're making it seem like this mystical hippy-dippy nonsense. It's instead very simple: if you're white you won't often (ever) be the target of racism, so you'll have a skewed perception of how common and powerful it is. No mystery here, friend.
The idea that our society has always been this race-obsessed and white people are just unable to pick up on it is racist nonsense, and there is no evidence which supports it. Indeed, all evidence corroborates the hypothesis that our race obsession is a phenomenon that developed in the last 10 years. No need to gaslight the white folks. :)
It’s the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, which sparked the largest ever protests seen in this country over the racist tendencies of of this country. One of the important take aways of those protests is understanding that these murders are not uncommon, but a part of what it means to be black in America. This has been the case for centuries. As long as we can safely say that the United States has an extremely racist past, it’s fair to say that skin tone has played a huge role in society.
How can you say that race’s role in the US has only recently become so large when there have been lynchings in the recent past, and it was legal to own someone who was black?
Surely we can consider those things as instances of skin tone being taken into consideration, no?
> How can you say that race’s role in the US has only recently become so large when there have been lynchings in the recent past, and it was legal to own someone who was black?
That's easy--I never said anything remotely like this. :) I quite explicitly scoped my claim to "within my lifetime". Indeed, everyone knows that race played a big factor in our nation's history. We made a lot of progress away from racial ideologies following the civil rights movement, and while the work isn't complete it doesn't follow that we should double down on different racial ideologies.
> One of the important take aways of those protests is understanding that these murders are not uncommon, but a part of what it means to be black in America.
I don't think that's remotely an appropriate takeaway. By all appearances, violent crime rates account for the disparity in police killings, which are indeed rare regardless of race (contrary to your "not uncommon" claim). Indeed, last time I dug into the WashPo police shootings database and filtered out all instances in which the deceased was wielding a weapon, the disparity virtually disappeared.
Further, while we're all familiar with the myriad cases of unjust police killings of black Americans, there are plenty of cases of white people heinously murdered by police which were never elevated by the media. Consider [Daniel Shaver][0], [Tony Timpa][1], and [Justine Damond][2] (all killed by police within a year or so of each other). Of course, people always say "they didn't get national attention because they weren't killed for their race" which is of course begging the question since the only evidence that George Floyd or whomever was killed for his race is the presumed lack of notable cases of white people being killed by police.
To the extent that fear of police is "part of what it means to be black in America", it appears to be a largely manufactured or vestigial fear.
The only appropriate conclusions to draw are:
1. the United States has a police brutality problem (irrespective of race)
2. that black citizens are more likely to commit crimes than citizens of other races--presumably for historical reasons--leading to a disparity in police killings of black citizens
3. the media will absolutely sow divisiveness on a nationwide scale for clicks
I'm pretty sure "hurt" and "offended" are synonymous in this context, or at least pretty close. In whichever case, I intended it without judgment, so re-read it accordingly.
I don't doubt you. But you didn't write it without transforming what they said in the first paragraph into something else in the second. I'm not calling for your head here, just pointing out a flawed linguistic turn that enables people to dismiss complaints about being left out again and again and again as histrionic (like I see nawgz doing in that sibling comment).
I disagree. I don't think there's anything to transform. "Offense" is an apt summary for the complaints. One of the HN guidelines is to read charitably, and in general splitting semantic hairs is rarely interesting IMHO.
What do you mean? People were offended by the content, reacting with tidbits like "they couldn't relate to it" and "they felt that the message was explicitly excluding them" even though the message was to "Go Vote" and only had one single human female hand in it.
To have people react like that, when the message was so far removed from race & gender, shows just how much work has to be done to minimize offense taken by any piece of content.
Strongly disagreed with your claim of "belittling".
Edit: I get downvoted a lot on this site without explanation. Really struggling to understand how this comment is worth downvotes but no responses...
One of the reasons to favor going to the most technical oriented panels and talks at these events: Way less corporate oversight and, since the subject is way too technical, less or no outraged humanities in tech in attendance.
I was in Bangalore today and had a taxi driver turn to me and say, "you know what, throwaway894345 may be pro-Damore and spend rhetorical time trying to downplay the Jan 6 riots, but I'm sure that anecdote about a female colleague working in communications getting flak for not making the hand black is in no way a ridiculous straw man for his own sentiments." A bunch of leftist professors happened to overhear us as we were stopped at the curb and immediately threw down their Che shirts and began sobbing and clapping.
This is such a bizarre retort, I'm honestly amused. And kudos to you for getting my username right--I can't even remember it, so your attention to detail is impeccable! Thanks for making my day a little brighter, and happy trails my friend.
That was the first time I've upvoted a comment whose raw message irritated me. You don't see many creative comments here. They seem to be discouraged. But at least we all have impeccable rationality!
Eh, you're falling into a trap. Some people just want to be outraged but what avenue they use comes and goes. It used to be "holier than thou", for example. Just try to navigate as best you can and try not to judge others for some sub-sub-group of career ass holes.
Meh, it's not exclusive to "woke" culture. Try to have a minority of some sort in literally anything and you will see the same reaction from the other side. Except probably with more vitriol and hate.
All the more reason to use something like Adobe Target to serve a picture of a black male hand to a black male viewer and a white female hand to a white female viewer.
That would be an incredibly short-sighted own goal from the point of view of diversity. You need people to feel accepted, but you also need them to be in contact with others, otherwise you favour insular or tribal tendencies. You need mixing across communities, not pandering to insecurity. You need people to realise that it’s ok to identify with someone with different physical characteristics, or to empathise with them.
I think it's helpful to distinguish between "not whitewashing" (i.e., representing the actual demographics) and actively showing the demographics some wish the industry had (which is also what whitewashing is, although whitewashing only applies when the desired demographics are white). Your comment seems to appeal to "not whitewashing", but Apple here appears to be promoting its own desired demographics or else they would probably use characters who are either racially ambiguous (e.g., the yellow emojis) or else representative of the larger industry.
Of course, there's the possibility that I'm reading too much into Apple's intent based on this one sample. If we wanted to be more certain we would have to do a more robust analysis.
I don’t know about this one, but last time the people were random. I have no doubt that their faces were closer to an “ideal” demographic makeup (according to some marketing people) than the reality, but it is not obvious looking just at one picture.
If someone is tenuously making the "yellow emojis are actually asians" argument, they're certainly acting in bad faith, but I guess bad faith is what got us here in the first place. I find myself pretty unwilling to accommodate bad faith, especially because by definition bad faith will always make increasingly ridiculous demands.
I think about that a lot when I look at corporate messaging like this. These days a lot of effort is put into making sure the content doesn't offend people who hold strongly to beliefs about race and gender--something that I might not be so aware of if I hadn't had her inside perspective. I wonder what kind of conversations must be had inside Apple's communications team about the "identities" of these avatars.
I'm sure some people will downvote this into oblivion (and fair enough--race and gender have been breathlessly promoted for the last 5+ years and some people are understandably fatigued of the topic), but I think trends about race and gender are interesting and maybe others will appreciate this anecdote.