Interviewing the Creator of the Afromoji
by Marisa Goolgasian
A Q&A with the woman who got sick of waiting for a natural hair emoji— and decided to do something about it.
Image Courtesy of @nytimesfashion
Image Courtesy of @xx_rhiannajones
Emojis have become so ubiquitous in virtual communication that we hardly register a change when a colorful symbol is used in place of the actual word it corresponds to. It’s therefore no surprise that, since the dawn of the emoticon era, the pressure has been on to ensure that this whimsical language substitute accurately represents all of the very many people who use it.
Today, 2,823 emojis are recognized by the Unicode Consortium, the California-based nonprofit that provides standards for digital text and oversees emojis. It has gone to great - and necessary - lengths to ensure that the emoji keyboard is inclusive of all cultures; there are a variety of skin tones and ages to choose from, different family structures including options with single parents and cultural headwear choices such as turbans and hijabs.
Image Courtesy of @nytimesfashion
In spite of this improvement over the years, thousands of people continue to take to social media to criticize Unicode, saying the organization still fails to address a lack of diversity that remains on multiple fronts across the emoji-verse, the most blatant of which being hairstyles. This is why one outspoken, hashtag-wielding New York woman has set out to secure the “Afromoji” its rightful spot on our keyboards.
Rhianna Jones, 29, was born and raised in Chicago but found her home in Brooklyn, New York, in 2012. As she is a writer and content creator by trade, the digital landscape is an integral component of her world. A proud practitioner of #BlackGirlMagic, Jones spent many years navigating her own cultural identity as a mixed-race woman, a process that ultimately led to her campaign’s inception. Deciding that she’d had enough of the absence of cultural inclusivity across the digital world, that it was time for the natural hair she adored to be duly represented, she created a design for a natural-haired emoji, the Afromoji, and started a campaign for its realization, #BlackHairMatters.
“The afro is one of the most discernible, visible iterations of our culture. It deserves to be seen,” says Jones.
To learn more about Jones, the Afromoji and the movement that has made a splash large enough to catch the eye of the New York Times, Bustle, NPR and Jezebel to name a few, Marisa Goolgasian sat down with Jones on Tuesday. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
MG: Have you always had a passion for advocating cultural inclusivity and diversity? Or is it something that just clicked one day?
RJ: It’s a mix of both… It really started off with being biracial in the city of Chicago, which on its own is so it's so diverse, but it's so segregated. I would go to where my dad grew up and it was all black, then I would go to school which was a diverse environment, but still white-centric. I was a cheerleader, and cheer hair's as white as it gets, so there were just all these, all these little micro-narratives in my life that caused me try to vacillate like, well am I black or am I white or am I in between? What does that look like?
And, yeah, so that just kind of started a very early journey of connecting my identity with my hair and having to figure those questions out for myself because bi-raciality wasn't nearly as pervasive as it is now when I was growing up.
Tell me about the design process and the design itself.
Original prototypes for the Afromoji design.
Image Courtesy of NPR.org
I had read that Tinder had a campaign for interracial couple emojis that they had just gotten approved and, being a product of interracial love, I was like, that's amazing. Let me see how they did it. Maybe it's not that difficult. So, I looked into the process and it's pretty user-friendly. I reached out to this friend of mine who is a graphic designer and also has an afro like, "Hey, I just had this idea." She was totally on board. We got together two days later and spent an entire day perfecting the design, getting her fluff just right which was hard because the standard size only leaves so much space for hair. And so we came up with designs for a man, for a woman, for a child. We did the gender neutral, and then we did an older person too. So we have five different designs.
Can you explain the process of proposing a new emoji? Is it challenging?
The proposal itself entails an abstract, a really thoughtful statement about why you think it's important and why you're proposing this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then a lot of analytics. How many times do people use #afro? How many people Google ‘afro’? How many people tweet the word ‘afro’? Numbers they need to know just how many people in the world would use it. Then there's the designs itself obviously, which needs to be in accordance with their size and style specifications so it could potentially be added in to the keyboard as-is.
How did the media get ahold of your story?
I happened to go to an event at The Wing for Afro and Latinx content creators, which was full of big hair energy. As people were leaving at the end, I grabbed the mic. and started talking. I just said, "I started this petition, you know, I see all the afros in the room... If y'all want to see yourselves in your own DMS, sign here." It just so happened that the New York Times reporter who picked up my story was in the audience. Once it was in the New York Times, I woke up and NPR and NowThis were in my DMS... like so many organizations. And then it was just a month straight of back to back to back to back to back interviews. It was so great and so exciting. And in the midst of it all, the petition, I mean it went from like, 10 signatures to 50,000 signatures all around the globe, in like, 10 different languages.
Have you faced any negativity as your campaign has grown?
Definitely. My NowThis video specifically got a lot of hate, because, you know, their reach is massive. Across Facebook and Instagram I had, like, a million people who watched my video and there were so many negative people being like, "People are dying of cancer- how can you think that this is important?”All this crazy shit. But the fact that people are so triggered by something as supposedly small as an emoji speaks to why it's such a larger issue. There's such a lack of education and empathy and understanding around black hair today.
Image Courtesy of @xx_rhiannajones
So…why hair? Why is it so important to you? Is there a story behind your ‘fro?
Growing up, the only girls that I ever saw that looked even remotely like me had straight hair; all the girls in Teen Vogue and all the dolls and all the TV characters... every iteration of femininity that I observed upheld these euro-centric beauty standards. So I was like, "well, if I want to look like a girl and like be womanly as a grown up, I guess I need to straighten my hair."
So, I straightened my hair from age 8 to 20. It wasn't until I went abroad in Paris that I started going natural because Paris is so like afro-friendly and Afrocentric and I was just seeing all these girls that looked like me... I'd never seen so much natural hair. And so from then on, all I've had is an afro. It becomes this sort-of unspoken sisterhood because it's such a journey for all of us, our hair.
I’m sure many people don’t realize that hair can have such an impact on a person’s sense of self or that such a sense of community and camaraderie can grow out of it.
People don't realize that it's like this unspoken language. Anytime I'm in a room with other women with Afrocentric hair, we always end up talking about our hair. It's like the ties that bind. It's just this narrative that connects us all together because we all know what it's like not be able to go in the pool when you're a little kid growing up because you have to worry about your hair getting wet, or to be at a sleepover where everyone's touching your hair and asking, “why does it do that?” That’s honestly why the emoji's so important; the more visibility there is in the same way that, you know, the more trans visibility and the more queer visibility and the more differently-abled visibility there is, the more that people are seeing and the more that their stories are told, the less 'otherness' there will be.
So, why is it so important for people to see themselves represented in the digital landscape?
There’s actually one comment in particular that was left on my Change.org page by this gentleman in South Africa that really sums it up. He said, "I grew up, never seeing anyone that looked like me and I never thought that I mattered." And that's what it's about. It's so much more than just a hairstyle. The afro is a movement, it's a culture, it's a people, it's an identity and it's a journey of, of people who for so long been told that they aren't acceptable just as they are. We've been conditioned for so long to modify ourselves to fit these constructs and, in a world that interacts in digital spaces and communicates largely digitally, where emojis have become this universal, creative form of self expression, we should be able to see ourselves in our conversations too.
