Yellow Was Never Neutral: How Emoji Defaults Trained Racist AI

Every design default encodes a claim about who the ordinary user is. The choice to make emoji yellow — framed at the time as avoiding racial specificity — was itself a racial argument: that the unmarked human is not racialized, and that racialization is something added to a neutral body. That framing at scale, because they inherited training data shaped by exactly that assumption. The community that built early internet standards was not malicious; it was homogeneous, and homogeneity reads its own…