AIBU to not understand skin tone emojis? Lately I've noticed more and more of my friends using the emojis that represent Asian / Black skin tones to reference themselves even though they are white Caucasian.
When the option to choose from several skin tones for emojis first existed, the only person that I know that used the black skin thumbs up (for example) was my black friend. This made sense - the thumb was representative of her thumb (or so I thought). Likewise if a friend (of any colour) was referring to an Asian friend, they would have used the Asian skin tone emoji to represent that friend in their message.
I would kind of get it if they selected a random emoji colour each time they used one to represent themselves, but they don't.
Am I missing something? There's a default option of yellow (like Homer Simpson) that clearly doesn't represent any real-life skin tone, so if people don't feel comfortable about choosing a skin tone that represents their particular skin colour, this is an option. But it just feels odd to talk about yourself in black emojis when you're white or Asian. But maybe I've missed the point of them. I stick with the default yellow to avoid causing offence (hopefully).