Can Emoji Promote African Culture?

Do you use emoji in text messages or on other social media? I do! I just sent a message to my daughter Beth, her daughter and her son’s girlfriend. They’re the likeliest cooks among those coming for Thanksgiving . We’re discussing the menu, as I’m sure many American families are doing now.

My granddaughter wants fried chicken, the way Mary, the girlfriend, makes it. We’ve agreed on ham, green beans, a corn dish my daughter makes, sweet potatoes, apple crisp and pumpkin pie. So I sent a text to say, “Do we still need a turkey?” I stuck in an emoji of a turkey 🦃 and took the word out. Beth replied in two minutes. “It’s not TG without 🦃!”

(I looked up emoji to see if it is singular and plural; apparently so, though emojis is also acceptable, I  learned.)

O’Plérou Grebet, a 21-year-old graphic design student from Ivory Coast, saw very few emoji representing African culture and people. He decided to do something to change this. He began with one design, and then created a new one every day until he had more than 200!

I read about him in Africa Top 10 News. (It’s the 5th story.) The writer says, “Although created as a way for Africans to ‘communicate more accurately using instant messaging,’ the emoji are also designed for non-Africans so they can discover a new culture with a modern and innovative approach.”

His were created to work in What’sApp, the most popular messaging tool in much of Africa. You can see a few in the original story in Collateral. And you can find more on his Instagram page.

He focuses first on a study on Long Island. “Working with outside experts, Newsday, the leading newspaper on Long Island, conducted a three-year investigation into racism in the housing market there, sending pairs of undercover testers (black and white, Hispanic and white, Asian and white) in sequence to realtors throughout the area,” he says.

He reports the results in The New York Times article. Forty percent of interactions with realtors showed racially disparate treatment. Real estate agents used several tactics. Some “refused to show listings or conduct house tours for minority testers, others steered them away from predominantly white neighborhoods. They warned white testers away from black or Hispanic neighborhoods while also showing more listings and allowing them to see homes without proof of mortgage-ready financing.”

Discrimination in employment has also been proved many times over. “Whites still receive more than a third more callbacks for jobs, even after accounting for education, local labor market conditions and other factors,” he says.

Bouie concludes, “There are solutions — you can expand state and federal anti-discrimination agencies, as well as fully enforce the Fair Housing Act, for starters — but the first step is to shake ourselves of the idea that explicit racial discrimination is yesterday’s problem.”

I love meeting with book groups. Usually several people have read my book, a few have not. But they are all eager to hear my story. Peace Corps experience is always interesting to audiences.

Traditions about weddings, the importance of palm wine and kola nuts, and how families are linked by marriage was also fun to describe.

They were curious about my experience as a White woman in a Black culture. Did I find prejudice against me? I said, “No, I didn’t feel prejudice against me. Rather a wariness at first to be sure I wasn’t disrespecting their culture.” My ability to speak Igbo was an asset.

This led us into an interesting discussion of racism – what it is and isn’t, and how white people can experience reverse racism.