Apple's recent plan to incorporate a diverse set of racial emoji's on its iOS operating system has garnered several and mixed criticism.
The fuss came about when Apple released a preview of its planned diversification of emoji's available on its platform. The preview includes an Asian man sporting a gua pi mao cap and an Indian man wearing a turban. However, what caught a lot of attention was the exceptionally yellow skin tone of one of the emoji's.
The color yellow is widely held as an ethnic slur towards Asian people. Many of the offended parties took their frustration to social networking sites in order to protest what for them is a racially offensive move from Apple.
A Twitter user of Asian descent posted a message, "Apple rolling out new racially diverse emoji! Not sure how I'm feeling about these ultra-yellow Asian emoji tho."
However, a post from Cult of Mac defended Apple saying that the company's color choice was based on the official guideline provided by the Unicode Consortium. The report adds that yellow is the standard and default race-neutral option in Unicode.
Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization that regulates icon certain standards including icon design in order to provide a consistent experience across multiple platforms. Additionally, on November 2014, Unicode said in a statement that the organization is planning to release a more diverse set of emoji.
Apple has been working with Unicode Consortium in order to update its own standards and provide a service that agrees with the regulation set by Unicode, according to LA Times.
The new emoji update will also be released on the latest version of Mac OS X.