When it comes to emoji, Apple supports everything from a smiling pile of feces to intricately detailed sunset landscapes. But if you’re looking for racial diversity there’s not a black person to be found and we’re not sure if the dude with the thick mustache is supposed to be latino, but if you scroll through the collection you’ll get the point.
The lack of racial diversity in emojis was not lost on MTV Act’s Joey Parker who decided to email Tim Cook about the controversy and was surprised to get a response the next day about Apple’s efforts to make emoji more diverse.
Here’s what Apple PR Queen Katie Cotton had to say about the emoji controversy:
“Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. 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 has only embraced emoji within the last few years for all users. Accessing emoji keyboards used to require third-party apps but can now be added from Settings.
The Verge confirmed with Apple that the email is authentic and noted the last major update for emoji came in 2012 when iOS 6 added gay and lesbian emoji along with an assortment of foods and animals. It’s about time the Unicode Consortium added some more colorful humans, maybe in time for iOS 8?
Source: MTV
