Imagine if professional work setting had initially started by employing a dress code with a full body yellow suit and a yellow mask that hides your gender and skin color to “avoid discrimination” and whatnot. It was universal.

Then, imagine that after a while, that rule was found too restricting and people were allowed to wear their own clothes and do away with masks.

When people chose that, would that be considered drawing attention to their skimcolor or gender, or using their right as existing as the person that they are?

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philwelch 2 days ago | parent [-]

> When people chose that, would that be considered drawing attention to their skimcolor or gender

Absolutely. But let me posit a scenario that’s actually realistic.

Suppose you’re running an orchestra. People are concerned about discrimination so you implement a blind audition policy where the auditioning musician can’t actually be seen by the people evaluating their performance. Afterwards, it turns out your orchestra is still predominantly made up of white and East Asian musicians so you decide to make the blind audition optional and make a bunch of tedious statements about how the orchestra isn’t diverse enough and you want more underrepresented minorities. What’s going to happen then is that the underrepresented minorities are going to do non-blind auditions because you’ve all but promised them you’d give them preference while the white and Asian musicians will continue doing blind auditions.

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sedatk a day ago | parent [-]

Your scenario is about hiring practices. What I'm talking about is a workplace setting; it means everyone is already hired, everyone already knows each other's skin color. Even if there are people who might want to take advantage of privileges based on their skin color, it wouldn't matter at the time. Even if it mattered, emoji wouldn't make a difference. I see no difference between using emojis with skin color and showing up to work without a head mask and a full body suit. Neither signals an agenda. It's just how we exist in society.

If someone feels that seeing a skin colored emoji as an imposition, and is forced to make a decision that they wouldn't otherwise do because of that emojji's color, they shouldn't be doing that job.

	▲	philwelch a day ago \| parent [-]
		The difference is that nobody actually works in a head mask and full body suit, unless they’re wearing PPE that happens to obscure those things. Covering 100% of your skin is very awkward and uncomfortable. You wouldn’t ever want to do that unless you needed to for some other reason. So let me propose another example that takes place in a workplace setting where everyone has already been hired. Let’s say it’s a welding shop where the workers are issued welding helmets, welding gloves, and protective long-sleeved overshirts. All of this PPE is provided by the shop. And let’s say that for several years, the PPE is all in the same standardized color, which is yellow because that’s the primary color of the company logo. One day the welding shop decides that, rather than just wearing the yellow PPE, they’re going to issue employees color-coded PPE that approximately matches their natural skin tone if that’s what they’d prefer. Regardless of whether you think it’s a good or bad idea, you can’t deny that such a policy places a lot of significance on skin color.