Here’s the set-up. The kind of folks who get outraged over a bleach company sending a tweet have been outraged for several years that the iPhone doesn’t offer more emojis of color— and truly there were vanishingly few. Apple has sought to change that, releasing a new expanded emoji keyboard today with more diversity of both skin colors, couples, families, and many other silly objects we’ve needed to express ourselves:
The emoji keyboard on the Apple iPhone has been updated to include “diverse” emojis, with a range of skin tones and different family combinations.
People can now pick faces with different skin tones, following criticism that the previous keyboard didn’t have enough diversity.
Families also now come with the option of two mums and two dads.The release of the new options got a lot of Internet buzz today, with a focus on the expanded skin tones. It’s in the latest operating system update for iPhones. Cue Clorox’s Twitter account, which knew about the release of new emoji but maybe not the uproar and enthusiasm about the emojis of color. Clorox tweeted this.
The company has since deleted the tweet because many people appeared to take it to mean that a mainstream American company was alleging it would like to use its product’s well-known bleaching qualities to turn all those nice new emoji back into the white people they should rightfully be. Now, does anyone actually believe that was Clorox’s meaning? Clorox, a company that would like to sell its household cleaning product to millions of Americans of all colors, allegedly desired to communicate to those Americans that it would like to eradicate their existence from emoji keyboards with the help of the efficient color-removing powers of Clorox bleach. And, in communicating this insane racist idiocy, which Clorox allegedly meant to convey, Clorox just forgot to include in its emoji portrait of a Clorox bottle any of the emoji of color it wishes to eliminate from our text conversations.
Certainly, there could be no other meaning Clorox had in mind. It couldn’t be that perhaps in making a Clorox bottle out of emoji objects, not people, the brand was attempting to communicate that bleach is useful in cleaning all sorts of things. Nah, couldn’t be that. What Clorox clearly wanted was for every person of color and all those who love them to know that the company is deeply and enthusiastically committed to racial emoji genocide via harsh chemical cleaners. That’s what the company was saying, everyone. Well done. Glad we’ve solved that.
Wish we could bleach away our last tweet. Didn't mean to offend – it was meant to be about all the
Here’s hoping no poor soul loses their job over this. If the social media manager committed the minor sin of incomplete pop cultural awareness of a story before tweeting about it, that is surely a sin that was covered by the second tweet. Not even that would have been necessary if we lived in a sane society where people actually weighed whether someone’s potential ill intent before signaling triumphantly to their peer groups that they are solidly superior and sensitive on matters of race to…the Clorox Twitter account. Congrats.
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/09/outrage-of-the-day-clorox-lambasted-for-allegedly-racist-tweet-about-emoji/
