The fight for emoji diversity is one with a long and storied history, but it looks like victory might be on the horizon: in the latest version of OS X, Apple is giving you more choice than just white emoji or racist emoji.
In case you’re not up to speed on the battle for #emojidiversity, here’s a quick primer: after Miley Cyrus tweeted angrily on the topic back in 2012, the internet rallied behind the emoji-diversity revolution, mostly through the medium of emoji-laden thinkpieces.
Breakthrough was achieved last year, when Apple pledged to introduce racially diverse emoji, but blamed the Unicode Consortium (the group responsible for emoji standardisation) for dragging their feet). Unicode promptly responded, and laid out the plan for emoji with a “range of skin tones” in late 2014.
Finally, it seems as if the battle is almost over: MacRumors notes that in the latest developer version of OS X, there’s a placeholder for five new skin colours for every emoji, following the recognised standard of the Fitzpatrick scale. All that it needs now is the Unicode Technical Committee to move Unicode 8.0: Non-Racist Edition to finalised status, and all will be well in the world. [MacRumors]