Something people living in almost entirely racially homogenous countries don’t often get is that you can’t help the problem of racism by trying to ignore it. The only way to correctly address racism is to realize that it exists, that people do have biases based on race & ethnicity, that there are groups that are underrepresented, and to actively work to provide more ways for people to represent themselves and their identity. The fact of the matter is that more representation, even in seemingly minor ways like more emojis which they can identify with more, helps normally underrepresented people feel more comfortable with themselves and their identity and helps alleviate societal pressures for them to mask their identity/culture. Even small changes play a part.

Acting “colorblind” just makes the problem of racism worse, as it means you’d be acting blind to obvious biases based on race/ethnicity… including people who are part of a certain in-group (or multiple in-groups) being overrepresented and people of an out-group being underrepresented or represented poorly/highly stereotypically. There is no morally just approach to discrimination which attempts to pay no attention to the traits being discriminated against.

It’s pride month, this is like one of the most relevant times of year to this… It may be easier to see from that point of view instead – what purpose does queer pride exist even in places where queer people are “legal”? Why are there pride flags and events and characters and such to represent LGBT people? A similar answer may be applicable to racial minorities.

I was raised in the part of the United States with likely the most racist/racially tense history in the nation, possibly one of the most in modern history (it was the heart of the Confederacy after all, one of the most significant historical events of our nation was burning down half the state and presenting my city to the president as a Christmas gift, I’m sure it’d make a top 10 list of the big racism or something), a place that still has extremely bad problems with racial discrimination, and I used to think the “colorblind” approach and avoiding race as much as possible was the solution to racism, but I’ve realized over time that this approach is a tool that racism uses to thrive – it makes people refuse to acknowledge the racism in the first place, and it causes people to be unable to find out what racism really means and how many minor things can have major affects on minority groups. It’s a very common approach by (often conservative/“libertarian”) people here who haven’t subscribed to the whole calling people racial slurs and committing hate crimes, but still can’t face the fact that racism is alive, everywhere around us, and that they’re likely participating in it or propogating it regularly despite not actively trying to be racist.

Basically… let them have their variously skin-colored emojis

Yeah you don’t get it and never will, that’s a shame