What skin tone emoji should I use in Slack reaction? [closed]

Question

There is a feature in Slack called emoji reactions. It allows users to respond to any message on Slack with an emoji reaction.
_{(source: slack.help)}

Also, you can choose a skin tone for your emojis:
_{(source: slack.help)}

If you do, this

will turn into that

If multiple people with different skin tones selected react to the same message it will look as follows:

If you want to support someone else's reaction you can just click on it.

Now to the question itself. Let's say there is a message with a reaction from someone of different skin color. What should I do if I want to add the same reaction myself? Both options seem bad to me. If I react with a reaction of my skin tone, it will be shown as a separate reaction. It will look like I want to put emphasis on my skin color and separate myself from whoever reacted the first. If I react with a reaction of the skin tone of whoever reacted the first, it can be seen as mockery or cultural appropriation. I'm really at a loss here.

Answer 1

Nobody will really care. I use Discord, software that is heavily based off of Slack, and I am on servers with a large amount of people that have differing skin tones. Most people just use the default yellow emojis, but there are a few people who have set it to match their skin tone.

It all depends on who reacts first. If I react with a yellow thumbs up, people who have set the emoji to a skin tone will still react with the same reaction, and vice versa. Just follow the reaction of the first person.

I would assume most people care about what the emoji actually represents rather than the skin tone of the emoji. If I had to say which one would be more offensive, I would think it would be adding your own reaction with your skin color (especially because you're white) as it could be seen as you not wanting to associate with people of darker skin color, but that is just my guess (also as a white guy, so take that part with a grain of salt).

I have had no issues with using the "wrong" skin tone on any of my 10+ servers when this has come up, but if someone has voiced an issue in the past then I would respect their opinions and follow that.

---

_{I can't access my Discord at this time to give examples, but I would post pictures if I could for proof.}

Answer 2

If I compare

It will look like I want to put emphasis on my skin color and separate myself from whoever reacted the first.

and

If I react with a reaction of the skin tone of whoever reacted the first, it can be seen as mockery or cultural appropriation.

then for me the first statement could be more true than the second. But this is an extremely subjective point of view.
So I would click an existing image, simply to not make it overcomplicated to watch.

I hope it calms you a little down if I tell you this doesn't look like a real problem to me ;-)
The probably most important thing to think about is if someone ever creates a problem out of this, remember to simply not vote any more on their postings.