Dear Cloud Support: "I'm a white person, and despite there being a range of skin tones available for emoji these days, I still just choose the original Simpsons-esque yellow. Is this insensitive to people of color?" -True Colors

I realize, True Colors, that this discussion has probably only complicated the dilemma you posed, rather than simplified it.

- MEGHAN O'GIEBLYN

Dear True,

I don't think it's possible to determine what any group of people, categorically, might find insensitive-and I won't venture to speak, as a white person myself, on behalf of people of color. But your trepidation about which emoji skin tone to use has evidently weighed on many white people's minds since 2015, when the Unicode Consortium-the mysterious organization that sets standards for character encoding in software systems around the world-introduced the modifiers. A 2018 University of Edinburgh study of Twitter data confirmed that the palest skin tones are used least often, and most white people opt, as you do, for the original yellow.

It's not hard to see why. While it might seem intuitive to choose the skin tone that most resembles your own, some white users worry that calling attention to their race by texting a pale high five (or worse, a raised fist) might be construed as celebrating or flaunting it. The writer Andrew McGill noted in a 2016 Atlantic article that many white people he spoke to feared that the white emoji "felt uncomfortably close to displaying 'white pride,' with all the baggage of intolerance that carries." Darker skin tones are a more obviously egregious choice for white users and are generally interpreted as grossly appropriative or, at best, misguided attempts at allyship.

That leaves yellow, the Esperanto of emoji skin tones, which seems to offer an all-purpose or neutral form of pictographic expression, one that does not require an acknowledgment of race-or, for that matter, embodiment. (Unicode calls it a "nonhuman" skin tone.) While this logic may strike you as sound enough, sufficient to put the question out of mind while you dash off a yellow thumbs-up, I can sense you're aware on some level that it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.