Amidst all the protests around the globe, the tech community is also engaging in some ways. GitHub has announced that they'll replace racially-loaded terms.
This includes dropping terms like "master" and "slave" for alternatives like "main/default/primary" and "secondary;" but also terms like "blacklist" and "whitelist" for "allow list" and "deny/exclude list."
What do you think about this? What other terms do you think should also be changed?
Latest comments (56)
I can see how master/slave could be problematic, but the "master" branch doesn't imply that there are slave branches, and certainly isn't racially loaded, just like a master bedroom doesn't imply there are slave bedrooms.
Either way, it doesn't really make any difference, and seems like a hollow gesture to me, but if it means that diversity increases on GitHub, then I'm all for it.
Is this a joke? I'm not trying to be provocative here but surely this is just insane?
blacklist/whitelist isn't racially loaded at all. There's basically no way to make that argument.
Master/slave. Ok sure, MAYBE you could make that argument. but that implies that no other race has ever been enslaved?
This whole thing sort of seems like a massive virtue signal, to show "wow look how progressive we are" Without actually doing much of anything.
Changing some technical terms isn't going to end racism. It's just going to inconvinence some people. Might not even do that.
I think renaming the "master" branch is,
I wrote more about these in another post.
Good for them. However, there are things that help the victims, and there are things that don't. This one doesn't, and it's probably done for their own image of themselves, to seem like they're doing something. This response is meek, at best, and egoistic, at worst. That's my opinion.
If they truly wanted to help, they would advocate and lobby for abolishment of private prisons and war on drugs, as well as demilitarization of police.
Exactly. GitHub could spend therr time and PR resources to stop their contract with the ICE, and rethink banning based on ethnicity.
Considering that tech has moved towards
workerfor a while, I'm not surprised by the change. Like, boss-worker nodes vs. master-slave nodes. Or even child processes. Things that are under or spawned off of a controlling element have been moving away from historically charged phrasing.I'm glad to see them making progress towards a better way of phrasing, but it makes me think less of them that they're doing it now... There's no way they actually care and aren't just doing it for the pat on the back for being progressive during #blacklivesmatter.
Wait until someone thinks "child process" is offensive because of "child labor".
Exactly. GitHub has far worse social problems to fix than the name of a branch (see point 6 in my post).
Thanks for gathering all of point 4 in one spot! I remember each of those individually, but seeing them all in one place is particularly damning.
I don't know about the point here, though (and similarly point 3 at your write-up). Since language and meaning evolve over time, I don't see an issue with renaming child processes if a lot of people associate it with child labor instead. In that case, it doesn't affect me at all if it stays or if it changes, but it could help people if it changes, so net win. This is also why I see Github's timing as the suspicious part -- they're getting positive feedback and recognition for something that they weren't affected by and a lot of people in what they see as affected populations don't see issue with.
They aren't doing it out of empathy when there's rarely a person affected. They're doing it to look good.
When white people start to care about something, things change REALLY quickly. All we have to do is care about the things that will have a real huge impact on the lives of underrepresented people.
It only took world wide protests to change one word. I don't know what we'll need to do real change... Is there even hope?
No reason to stop trying💪
I'd be interested to know whether this idea came forward from a POC. I don't think this would've been the first thing that came to mind for me if asked what Github could do in response to the #Blacklivesmatter movement. I personally don't feel this will accomplish much for POC but I guess changing it won't harm anything.
Probably not. See point 4 in my post.
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