'The Emoji Story' Chronicles The Campaign For A Hijab Emoji, History Of Picture Characters
The purple hijab emoji. (Lucy Martens) Emojis help people show emotion in digital spaces — but the little, pixelated characters don't always represent the diversity of their users. And changing that isn't easy, as Rayouf Alhumedhi knows well. At age 15, she campaigned to add an emoji depicting a woman wearing a hijab, the head covering donned by many Muslim women. "If there are four emojis to represent four different stages of a mailbox. Why isn't there one to represent half a billion Muslims who wear a headscarf?” she questioned when she presented her case in 2016. Alhumedhi's story is t...
Source: wbur.org