Burke, Meghan, Colorblind Racism

Book Review.

“One part politics, one part technology, one part history”: Racial representation in the Unicode 7.0 emoji set

Emoji are miniature pictographs that have taken over text messages, emails, and Tweets worldwide. Although contemporary emoji represent a variety of races, genders, and sexual orientations, the original emoji set came under fire for its racial homogeneity: minus two “ethnic” characters, the people emoji featured in Unicode 7.0 were represented as White. This article investigates the set of circumstances that gave rise to this state of affairs, and explores the implications for users of color whose full participation in the emoji phenomenon is constrained by their exclusion. This project reveals that the lack of racial representation within the emoji set is the result of colorblind racism as evidenced through two related factors: aversion to, and avoidance of, the politics of technical systems and a refusal to recognize that the racial homogeneity of the original emoji set was problematic in the first place.

Toward an economic sociology of race

Race is central to economic life, but race is not central to economic sociology. We argue that economic sociologists should treat racism as a constitutive, structuring force, analytically co-equal with capitalism, patriarchy and nationalism. Our article has three aims. First, we document how canonical and award-winning works of economic sociology do not discuss race and racism, and do not engage with the contemporary sociology of race. Second, we identify six key insights from the sociology of race and suggest how they could influence economic sociology: the emergence of race out of racism, an understanding of racism as structural, the role of whiteness, the intersections between racism and other systems of oppression, the ideology of colorblind racism and the fundamental connections between racism and capitalism. Third, we conclude by discussing recent research that bridges the two subfields and lays the groundwork for an understanding of ‘racialized markets’ and ‘racialized economies’.