It has been recently released that Apple has decided to make new emoticons or “emojis” that are more “racially diverse.” It was stated by chief executive Tim Cook that they wanted to be inclusive of more people when he was emailed by an employee of the MTV staff. MTV reported that Apple’s vice-president of worldwide corporate communications, Katie Cotton said, “There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.” Apple later explained that the lack of ethnic range is due to their Unicode standard, saying that applications and programs are to display text and icons that are the same as one another.
Apple says that the reason they have waited so long to make this change is because they do not solely have the power to do such a thing because the Unicode standard is set and managed by the Unicode Consortium. With that being said, before Apple could make a change, it had to be accepted by the consortium before taking any action. In the past few years, emojis have become increasingly popular. There are various icons for food, vehicles, animals and people. There is not a single icon depicting an African American person and quite a few stars have complained about the seemingly parochial views of Apple regarding the scarcity of ethnic diversity.
(Image Source: iCLIPART)
