> the LEGO trap of claiming that ‘the yellow doesn’t specify any specific race so it can represent any of them!’ Which maybe held water right up until they wanted to make a Lando Calrissian minifigure

Your analysis is ahistorical.

A simple image search shows that LEGO figures were not, in fact, all yellow all the time, e.g. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.brothers-brick.com/... In fact, Lando's own colour varies across editions. You might also have pointed out that they didn't make Yoda yellow, either.

More importantly: the earlier figures, when they were "yellow", were definitely more subtle shades that could more realistically represent "white people", who were overwhelmingly the original audience (since the toy was invented in Denmark, and we're talking about a period long before the modern political sensibilities around "diversity and inclusion"). It seems clear to me that there was a goal of something like realism for a long time, and that goal continues with licensed figures. Skin tones are just kinda hard to do in most artistic media.

That history also predates Unicode emoji. If anything, LEGO has settled on a specific shade of yellow for "generic" people because of the ubiquity of emoji.

> The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.

My experience strongly indicates that white people overwhelmingly "were fine being yellow", and that there are two clear reasons for it:

* They suspect that not-white people who choose a colour are trying to make a point of their not-white status for political or ideological reasons, often in a context where there's no good reason for it to matter

* They worry that if they choose the "white" skin tone that they'll be perceived as trying to make the same point about being white, and furthermore that doing so may attract strong negative attention, in the form of rhetoric about "white supremacy".

My experience also strongly indicates that both these ideas are entirely reasonable to hold. In practice, the "dark" skin tones are an option that not-white people have to draw attention to themselves (and they often choose not to); the one "light" skin tone is only every used ironically to make a political point. It's well understood that people with a specific range of skin appearance are, for historical reasons specific to one part of the world (which is not where emoji originally come from), not permitted to take "pride" (whatever that means, when referring to something you can't meaningfully change about yourself) in the fact of having that skin appearance, while everyone else is.

And of course, hardly anyone would be comfortable using emojis that deliberately misrepresent their own skin tone, except by "choosing" yellow — because yellow is seen as the default, by everyone. (Because it also structurally is, the way Unicode works, and the way that emoji-selection UIs work. People will commonly see the yellow versions as a failure or refusal to choose, rather than as a choice.)