Disclaimer: I'm a white engineer who is now a VP. I also have a black daughter. I can't speak for the black experience(s) because I'm not black, but I'm also acutely invested in seeing things get better in terms of race relations and opportunities for all people.
A few thoughts:
1. Words matter. They aren't the most important thing per se, but they shouldn't be ignored. Over time, all these little changes do add up.
2. What is the most important thing? Authentic relationships. As I've gotten to know more people of color over the last decade, relationships are what grounds my perspectives and shapes my thinking. Truly understanding someone, and having yourself understood, is critical to overcoming the long-term race problems in America (and beyond).
3. Alongside relationships, doing the hard work of educating yourself is critical. White people in America tend to only see the dominate white culture as the _only_ culture. You need to educate yourself to understand this isn't true. But this is where relationships come in: "Black" culture (or Asian culture, or Latinx culture) is not monolithic, so the relationships create the commentary to understand the broader trends. Both the right and left in America tend to not do this part well.
A final thought: it starts in the schools. Those of us with authority and decision making power need to be investing in spending time mentoring the next generation of engineers.
Why isn't the discussion that it's also quite racist to associate the word "slave" with Blacks/Africans? People don't seem to know any history when they say that. It's not only Africans that got enslaved, peoples of all ethnicities did.
It's just virtue signaling at the end of the day. It's ridiculous watch everyone fight over this while missing the root cause.
1. There's the state of slavery today, which is actually pretty horrible worldwide.
2. There's the issue of race relations in the USA, and the historical context of those relations. In the American context, I think it's fair to focus on that context. At least, I think it's counterproductive to try and redefine the term because it deemphasizes that context.
I'm sorry, but you've got it completely backwards. If you're doing a word association and the first thing you think of for 'black' or 'African American' is 'slave', then yeah that's racist. But slavery in America (and we are talking about America here, Github is based in the US, not ancient Rome) was 100% connected with and built on top of notions of racial superiority. Addressing issues of racism today does require us to ignore or downplay racism in history.
"It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States." — Thomas Sowell
Of course it's also a fallacy to lump the entire phenomenon of slavery under one umbrella. Islam does not allow enslaving people just by attacking them and taking them hostage as what the US did with Africa. Furthermore, the system is fundamentally different under Islam, so much so that the Mamluk Sultanate came to be, something unprecedented in human history.
this is a stupid argument, the African slave trade and it's ramifications are so throughly discussed in America because it is the main type of slavery that occurred in the US
That seems like a completely valid point: Can we still use the terms master/slave when actually discussing the atrocious history of slavery in America? Why are these words considered hateful? They are useful words that describe a concept very clearly.
Interesting thoughts, but it doesn't address the content of the article. The article is saying renaming master to main in Github won't help race relations one bit and he's annoyed that it's probably white people who come up with these things rather than (his example) putting money into retraining for ethnic minorities who change careers.
All your points are true and using positive language around race does matter. Just the desire to remove the word master (which also means principle) from use will not help a single black person or ethnic minority and is simply designed to look good without any real progress being made.
This kind of reaction by Americans are amazing to me as a Mexican. It's like... Americans jump to all these hoops and loops to show how NON RACIST and NON DISCRIMINATORY they are but then keep discriminating and being racist in small everyday things.
I had the opportunity of living in the UK and Germany for several years. Sure, there's racist people there (particularly in Eastern Germany where I lived!). But in general I liked the feeling of not being racist just by... not being racist. When race just doesn't matter, is when you really have killed racism.
So yeah, keep removing statues, renaming stuff and do anything else that makes you sleep at night. But at the end of the day if you want to stop discriminating, just... stop discriminating.
> The article is saying renaming master to main in Github won't help race relations one bit and he's annoyed that it's probably white people who come up with these things.
I think he's right that it was probably white people who came up with it.
My first point is that words do matter. We can debate how much the specific word "master" matters, but my point was that words do matter.
My other point about investing also supports his main thesis.
I guess what the article was suggesting was that context determines whether words matter and it's ridiculous to determine that words matter for someone else without including them in the conversation.
"Words matter" is also the reason the other side of the debate fights so vociferously. Perhaps this is the fault of our educational system, but many cases for renaming would lose much of their steam if the involved and onlookers knew more about homonyms, etymology, and what the actual common usage of these words were in classic literature. Language prescriptivists can't get past their perception of renaming as indulging a slippery game of schizophrenic word-association.
My extremely liberal grandmother who was a NYC English teacher and penpal of many authors despised email, Twitter, pop culture, and Trump for what she thought was the degradation of English. Earlier as an optimistic techie, I thought she was being ridiculous but I recently started seeing her point now that society lines up on both sides of daily culture war arguments over miscommunicated non-existent strawmen and red herrings.
On the other hand, language is not prescriptive. If people start to see words differently, for whatever reason, and thus change their usage - that is nothing new in the history of language and is how languages have evolved since the dawn of time. I can see the utilitarian trade-off of simply realizing this is just that and if it helps more people's psyche than it hurts then maybe we should just go with it (as long as that benefit is proved statistically in the population at large, and isn't just an ivory tower assumption).
A few thoughts:
1. Words matter. They aren't the most important thing per se, but they shouldn't be ignored. Over time, all these little changes do add up.
2. What is the most important thing? Authentic relationships. As I've gotten to know more people of color over the last decade, relationships are what grounds my perspectives and shapes my thinking. Truly understanding someone, and having yourself understood, is critical to overcoming the long-term race problems in America (and beyond).
3. Alongside relationships, doing the hard work of educating yourself is critical. White people in America tend to only see the dominate white culture as the _only_ culture. You need to educate yourself to understand this isn't true. But this is where relationships come in: "Black" culture (or Asian culture, or Latinx culture) is not monolithic, so the relationships create the commentary to understand the broader trends. Both the right and left in America tend to not do this part well.
A final thought: it starts in the schools. Those of us with authority and decision making power need to be investing in spending time mentoring the next generation of engineers.