Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am white. I kept mine yellow for a long time. Then I noticed that most of the non-white people I knew were changing them - and actively celebrating when new skin-color variants were added. I realized that by keeping mine white I was not being ‘color-blind’, I was, at least to some, saying something like ‘I’m happy with the default because I think it adequately represents me’. Perhaps I did feel that, to be honest!…
In other words you succumbed to peer pressure from a crowd that is obsessed with identity labels. I see people of all shades use tones. To me it just says "btw I'm ". I can't help but think "who cares" in the back of my mind. I don't think yellow icons "represent me" either, I'm not self-inserting into The Simpsons. At the risk of being overly dramatic for a discussion about emoji, I think that dismissing the concept…
That’s not what I consider myself to have done. My non-white friends and colleagues are not, in my experience, ‘obsessed with identity labels’. They were just choosing an emoji that looked a little more like them, and a little less like the ‘default’ [that did _not_ look like them, but arguably did look like me] when representing themselves.
This is all in contexts where I knew who I was communicating with, btw (Slack, text messages etc.). In anonymous settings I might think differently.
In a ‘color-blind’ world perhaps it would not really matter to you what color people’s emojis were, just like in real life?
As a bit of a meta-comment, I suggest that if you want to convince others of your beliefs you might want to present them with a little more humbleness and kindness apparent in your words. Your first two paragraphs are quite confrontationally phrased.