Race, Gender and ITINSC 351 UTK Fall2015

Understandably, Apple didn’t want to create caricatures, giving those emoji an afro or thicker lips. But the company had already done something similar. With the first batch of emoji, they clearly identified one character as Asian, giving it narrow eyes and a skull cap. Another was clearly identified as Middle Eastern, with browner skin and a turban. And many were identified as white, with blond hair and blue eyes. Apple should have simply removed the racialized emoji altogether. What they did instead was homogenize and whitewash them. And now, in an absurd twist, you can change the skin tone of emoji that were specified as Asian or Middle Eastern. It’s political correctness gone wild.

More than one scholar has argued that as a concept, race should be “confined to the dustbin of analytically useless terms” (Miles, 1989:72) And yet it persists: race has been used to refer not just to physical features, but also to differences in “nationality, religion, ancestry, class and biological sub-categories” (McIlwain2011: pg.) The belief in race as scientific truth started in the 1700’s, with European colonialism, the slave trade, and pronouncements that Whites were the highest “race” of humans. By the twentieth century, advances in evolutionary theory and genetics utterly refuted so-called “racial science,” as scholars came to regard race not as biological fact, but as an ideological system for “thinking about, categorizing, and treating human beings” (McIlwain, 2011.)

Custer’s Revenge brutally objectifies women and disrespects Native Americans in a manner that words like “tasteless” or “crude” cannot do justice to.