Community Corner
Let's Make Afro Hair Emoji Happen, Bed Stuy Woman Says
Rhianna Jones hopes her Afro Hair Emojis will be added to the Unicode library in 2020 and has launched an online campaign to make it happen.
BEDFORD-STUYVESANT, BROOKLYN -- A Bed-Stuy woman is on a mission to make the Afro Hair Emoji happen in 2020.
Rhianna Jones, 28, launched a Change.org petition and online campaign called #AfroHairMatters to demand the Unicode Consortium add people sporting afros to its ever growing library of emoticons, BET was first to report.
"Afro Hair is beautiful and our emoji should reflect that," Jones writes in her proposal. "The addition of the Afro Hair Emoji would help diversify cultural representation and provide a more inclusive experience for more emoji users."
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Jones plans to submit her petition, with as many signatures as she can muster, to the consortium on March 31, in hopes the Afro Hair Emoji, designed by Kerrilyn Gibson, will launch in 2020, she wrote.
The petition had garnered more than 300 votes as of Thursday afternoon.
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Jones told BET she was inspired to demand an Afro Hair Emoji "in a room full of bold, beautiful Black girls, [with] Solange’s 'Binz' on repeat."
“When an afro’d person walks into a room, you know that person has something to say," Jones told BET. "We wanna slide into your DMs with that same big-hair energy — insert Afromoji here.”
Read the full interview here.
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