Apple is making emoji more culturally diverse

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. 

Emoji — the tiny art that can be stuck in texts, emails, and elsewhere to emote thoughts, feelings, and replace entire words — doesn’t have a whole lot of diversity when it comes to the humans who are depicted. Very few of those characters, which originated from Japanese phone carriers, are non-Caucasian, though it might not be that way for long. Speaking to MTV Act, an Apple spokeswoman says the company has been “working closely” with the Unicode Consortium (of which it’s a member) to update, and perhaps expand the emoji character set.