Absolutely, emojis shouldn't have a race, gender or sexual orientation. They should be round and yellow. When they're yellow genderless blobs, they're universal, they transcend categorization. They're abstract representations of an emotion. This racially diverse politically correct human emoji movement is just ridiculous and can be more racist than not. [1]
EDIT: What's more, if you go this route and truly want to embrace diversity you get to take a mandatory lesson in combinatorics. Consider the "couple" emoji. A couple should be any combination of two human emojis of any race and gender with repetition allowed (to allow same sex and/or same race couples). A family of three or four has even more combinations (consider interracial couple with adopted children). What about unconventional families, single parents, anyone? Why is there no emoji for an extended family? No wonder the family emojis are still nuclear and yellow.
I really wonder about the combination of ignorance of Unicode, stick-in-the-mud attitude to diversity and appetite for accidental irony that makes someone write a long paragraph (570 characters - that's at least 10^170 combinations of characters - basically impossible to store) about how it's impossible in 2016 to apply combining characters to emoji (which is how the diverse emoji are already implemented).
I didn't imply that it's impossible. I just mean it is silly. Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations. Perhaps you would need to enter your race when you create a Google or Apple account to alleviate this. Or perhaps the vendor has already analyzed the cloud stored pictures of you and your family members, determined the age, race, gender and the resulting family tree and handily preselected the appropriate emoji for you. I mean this is an exaggeration, but that's how ridiculous I think single "human" emojis already are.
If you want to respond in a way that shows who you personally are, send a picture, today's messaging apps together with front and back facing cameras make it easier than ever before. If you want a quick impersonal throwaway response, there's always a yellow emoji. The in-between "catered to you" emojis are an awkward, uncanny middle ground.
What's your point in bringing up combinatorics then?
> Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations.
Imagine using the most trivial kind of UI (literally a LRU cache would do the job) so that emoji you use more often are presented first. In fact, you don't even need to imagine, because this is how they already work on Android.
I have to wonder why you are dedicating so much energy to problematizing uses of emoji that you disapprove of without really seeming to know much of them. If they don't work for you maybe just don't use them?
I'm going to leave this link in the rather forlorn hope that something about it might take root:
These days when I have to send the :thumpsup: smiley on IMs I am presented with a list of 6 different coloured smileys, I end up not using smileys at all, it is rather annoying to have race/sex/colour to a smiley. Come on they are cute little pieces of graphics, don't put a sex/race/colour to it! It all started with whatsapp, they'll say in the future.
EDIT: What's more, if you go this route and truly want to embrace diversity you get to take a mandatory lesson in combinatorics. Consider the "couple" emoji. A couple should be any combination of two human emojis of any race and gender with repetition allowed (to allow same sex and/or same race couples). A family of three or four has even more combinations (consider interracial couple with adopted children). What about unconventional families, single parents, anyone? Why is there no emoji for an extended family? No wonder the family emojis are still nuclear and yellow.