I want to share my own reactions to the name change since this is a really interesting topic. For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves.
- The first time it occurred to me that "master" in this context could offend anyone was when GitHub changed the name (and broke my workflow).
- My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone who isn't black.
- My next reaction was, "they may be changing the name for the wrong reasons, but the change is brilliant."
Let me explain a little more. Whether motivated purely by virtue signaling or by more genuine intentions, changing the name doesn't fix any of the problems that black people face. The article explains this well.
What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way.
So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
As another black SWE, I'll add that I disagree with your perspective. I think the name change does more harm than good because it trivializes the movement. If the goal is to change minds and open hearts then where appropriate, we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message. Stuff like this is just preaching to the choir and alienating the rest, but also not actually changing anything that matters in the lives of black people.
>I think the name change does more harm than good because it trivializes the movement.
>If the goal is to change minds and open hearts then where appropriate, we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message. Stuff like this is just preaching to the choir and alienating the rest.
> Also not actually changing anything that matters in the lives of black people.
I couldn't have put this better myself. There are two issues
- What people want is justice, including economic justice, and progress. They want to stop being discriminated by gerrymandering politicians and trigger-happy cops. They want an economy that serves everyone and not just those on the very top, and that does not disproportionally discriminate those on the bottom and especially minority communities with a history of disadvantage. In this sense, changing master to main is nothing but a feel-good measure for privileged white people to feel good about themselves without actually having to put in any effort into tackling hard problems like improving democracy or improving the economic system.
- Besides this, it's actually a stupid move in a political, pragmatic sense. Like you're saying, it alienates precisely those you need to bring to your side ("it's pc gone mad!") and it's only going to be well received by those already pre-disposed to agree with you. It's actually my main criticism of the Left nowadays: we are shit at politics! You have to be pragmatic and somewhat calculating to actually get shit done. Many activists on the left today rather childishly think that simply being right is enough, as if you didn't have to be smart, convincing, use rhetoric, etc.
A (black) engineer colleague of mine told me about his team's effort to change master to main. The whole initiative was started by a rainbow colored hair (white) PM and since it was what they believed to be a highly visible and easy fix, grew to a team of 5. All non-technical PMs of course.
They ended up producing a "manifesto of inclusive software" where they listed every word they considered offensive and what it should be replaced with and made a very public announcement regarding the change.
The only response to their email was my (black) colleague asking if the branch renaming could be postponed to after a release because he didn't know what it could break in the build and release automation in case "master" is hard-coded somewhere.
This apparently started a lengthy thread between him and the 5 PMs where they explained to him that the reason he wasn't supportive of the change was because of the "systemic and cultural racism" he apparently internalized.
> If the goal is to change minds and open hearts then where appropriate, we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message.
As another black SWE - I have to ask which hearts are we trying to open? Some are far too gone and it would be a waste of time to try to convince them to let go of their bigotry. The very same will feign engagement and argue in bad faith while being energy vampires. Why should I supplicate racists before I have my dignity as a human? Fuck "hearts and minds" - I have no way of definitively knowing those - I'll take changed behavior instead, that's all I truly care about. If I ever have kids, I can't have them live like this.
> we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message
I agree, but you need to consciously consider who these people are - if it's everyone, then the battle is already lost.
Yes, this is a good summary of what these changes do. They allow white people to pat themselves on the back, without actually doing anything material to help break down racism.
Totally agree. Had they made a real change that actually mattered, all this time spent on discussing this rename, could have been put into better use. They created buzz, changed nothing.
I tend to agree with triviality. But I’m white and can’t vocalize that opinion IRL. However I do feel like people of my pigment also do these things as risk mitigation. Eg. Most of the world was caught off guard by the Dr Seuss thing. It seems quite obvious to me the family proactively took the books out of print because the fallout from being targeted by SJW or whoever would be huge. People are out there looking for things to be offended by, brands to attack, etc and if you’re a big company you don’t want to be caught in those crosshairs.
That said, I do recall getting “pat us on the back” vibes from GitHub but just wanted to throw this alternate justification out into the discussion.
As a Black data scientist I will say that words have power. That naming things has power. That acknowledging the depth of white supremacy, its depravity, and need to utterly and completely remove it and all of its vestiges is the most important work that can be undertaken.
There used to be a Confederate statue in the town square where I live. Many Black people worked over decades to point out what the statue symbolized, how the Klan had revised history in building that statue. Some white people wanted it gone. Finally a lot of white people wanted it gone. Then these same people
began calling for reparations. A local college instituted reparations. There are calls to engage with land back movements.
I’ve lived through many backlash cycles. Locally we’re still dealing with egregious health disparities that are costing Black lives daily. There is gentrification. The city’s just lived through a night in which white supremacy took the lives of several Asian women.
But something has changed.
Words matter. We have to keep chipping away at this monster.
I'd extend these virtue signaling "moments" to stuff like changing the names of sports teams and bases and all of the attempts to scrub "offensive" things from our lexicon.
It's not just limited to "black" but also American Indians, gay people, trans, etc.
These all strike me as Priviledged people being offended for others and trying to scream "LOOK AT ME I'M FIXING THINGS!!!" with stuff that matters to no one... and in the end, they widen the divide and make everything 100x worse with all the policies to "fix" racism/sexism/all'the'other'isms but making everything about race/sex/etc.
So divisive and counter productive uses of time that solve nothing.
The major injustices and crimes of history were profitable because a targeted group was dehumanised for the gain of others. The economic victimisation of black people in the US continues to be profitable.
> it trivializes the movement
As a developer, I am comfortable with the change in terminology. As a human... My phenotypes are different from yours and OP's, but I am certain that if we do not bring the critique to bear against systemic enslavement of people (regardless of "targeted" phenotypes), we have all missed the point and really changed nothing. Who is blacker or whiter or truer to the tribe... these are serviceable distractions.
Slavery is abhorrent to any enlightened human. But slavery existed and continues to exist because those who profit like it that way.
Honest question, my initial response is that it only trivializes the movement if "see, we changed something" is used as an excuse to stop there. But if it isn't... what's the harm?
Most of this family of points seems to equate 1) being in favor of changing master to main; and 2) being in favor of stopping there.
The whole "this is pointless", "that is stupid" movement has definitely thrown up a "fuck it then" anti-signal in my mind.
If most things we can do is pointless, fuck it, everything we do is probably pointless.
I'm actively fighting against my own mindset to keep looking for things I can do that will make an effect. Most probably won't. I get it's just virtue signalling or whatever phrase of the week we're calling it but it's also inertia. Yes this one is pointless, but maybe the next step isn't.
Anyone that's ever been told what they're doing is useless will never know.
Shamefully I didn't give any consideration to anyone but myself, keeping my existing mindset everyone on the internet was a white guy like me with all the privileges I have. GitHub changing master to main might have been a joke to you, fair enough, but it opened my eyes.
This seems pretty close to just saying, “If we can’t change the world, let us change nothing at all.”
Sure, it’s trivial. It doesn’t, in any significant way, actually do anything. But I find a lot of time when reviewing code — if there are code badly formatted or variables misspelled, I have a hard time looking at the actually problems in the code until those superficial things are fixed.
I think the main goal for this kind of symbolic actions is to raise awareness. Only the fact that we are now here discussing about the problem, is a big success, imho.
Should they also do, not only symbolic but also considerable actions? The hell they should.
But that doesn’t make the first point moot.
They’re actually alienating the choir, with actions like that.
I’m a white person who has performed in a professional production of The Black Nativity. I was literally part of the choir celebrating black traditions in the US.
I now work in software and think less of any racialized group using historic struggles as a tool of power, control, and oppression in the here and now.
Historic wrongs are not an excuse for present wrongs.
I am genuinely curious: the LibreOffice team changed the file blacklist to excludelist. Do you believe this was just tokenism? I personally thought it was a great thing. But I am interested in hearing your perspective.
The worst I have seen is the media's failure to cover that Google - and probably Microsoft too - blacklisted historic black universities for over a decade. This a juke, a pump fake - not something substantial.
1) The burden falls disproportionately on Git maintainers and on people with large amounts of dependencies to the old word which is not a good way to distribute work (across tech workers) when making changes especially since some people will not even notice the change.
2) Not everyone uses Git each day and I am certain that people who continue to use the word "master" without knowing a thing about what Git is will be viewed as racist and morally inferior. E.g. (Master of Ceremonies, Master of Arts, etc.). Explain how a tech worker can agree that "master branch" is offensive but putting that they have a "Master of Science" on their CV is fine.
3) Somewhat arbitrarily changing words with a tenuous relation to racism seems like an extremely passive aggressive, murky, and dangerous path to go down. Not only does it lay a trap for people to be accused of being racist but if this is acceptable it is inconsistent with not removing all words associated with slavery. Even words with a distant relation to slavery.
"Not everyone uses Git each day and I am certain that people who continue to use the word "master" without knowing a thing about what Git is will be viewed as racist and morally inferior. E.g. (Master of Ceremonies, Master of Arts, etc.). Explain how a tech worker can agree that "master branch" is offensive but putting that they have a "Master of Science" on their CV is fine."
Honestly I find it terrifying that high ranking tech people can't see the cognitive dissonance they're showing.
Either they're lying in a pitiful attempt to fit in with the silicon valley leftist elites or they're actually intellectually inept. Either way it's not good.
Its the master/slave dynamic that is considered the issue...if there were Slaves of Ceremonies and Slaves of Arts as official titles, we might eventually take a second look at the naming too.
“Master of Science” is simply a use of a different meaning of the word. If anyone is suggesting to not use “master” across the board, even in the sense of “being really good at something,” they can shove off.
While the “master” branch is clearly using master in the sense that it asserts control of the other branches in some way.
So IMO, explaining could be done by pointing at the dictionary.
I don't get this "implicit bias" concept. According to media and social media, if I deny that I'm a racist, then I'm just not aware of my implicit bias. Honest question, how is it this different from:
1, If you believe in Jesus, then you can walk on water. If you can't walk on water, then you don't truly believe in Jesus.
2, Chinese saying, "杀人诛心“，meaning that accusing one's motive is worse than killing that person, as the accused couldn't even defend against the accusation. Attacking the Motive is a logical fallacy, no?
3, Back in the 1960s in China, if you were born in a not-so-red family and denied that you were counter revolutionary, then you were just deeply counter revolutionary, and therefore deserved more severe punishment.
Since when people are not judged by their behavior but their thoughts that someone else assert?
Honest answer, generally people aren’t talking about judging people for their implicit biases, but asking them to be aware of them to prevent those biases from influencing their actions in ways they don’t intend. Those actions then may be judged, naturally.
Hopefully an example that’s not too prickly: I’m from the south of the US. I don’t have a southern accent (except when drunk or sleepy!). A lot of people, myself included, have an unconscious bias that people with southern accents are less intelligent than people without. However, I’ve known lots of smart people with southern accents, and lots of unintelligent people without them. I don’t know why I have this bias: it was instilled in me by the culture I grew up in, I guess. But, because I am aware of it, I can watch out for those reflexive feelings that make it more likely for me to dismiss something someone is saying just because of their accent. I can adjust my actions to align with the kind of unbiased person I’d like to be, even though I can’t control the lingering feelings the bias creates.
This is the general idea of wanting people to be aware of their implicit biases: not to judge them due to those biases, but to help them see that, due to societal or cultural or familial influence, they may not be living up to the kind of person they’d like to be. There’s a huge difference between someone who’s consciously racist and someone who has racist priors due to the culture they grew up in. Many in the latter group accidentally propagate racist systems, even though they would never want to do so if they had a conscious choice. But it’s hard for anyone to see how their subconscious affects their day-to-day opinions. The hope of teaching about implicit bias is that people can see its effect in their lives and make adjustments, hopefully reducing the systemic problems that people face in the process.
These tests have been administered to large numbers of people and on average, almost every single person that has taken the test has scored some level of implicit bias. As a result, it's very likely (but not certain) that you ARE unaware of your implicit bias.
Of course, if you take the tests and score perfectly, you'll now be able to demonstrate empirically that you have no measurable implicit bias and will have an answer to those people who insist you do.
The reason why this is different to the walking on water statement, is that there are hundreds of thousands of data points all showing implicit bias is almost universal, whereas there are zero data points showing people can walk on water after believing in Jesus.
The viewpoint stems from the idea that implicit biases mean racism is the default state. To do something is to be anti-racist, which requires energy. To do nothing means racism persists, which could be considered pro-racism. A big part of this definition is trying to realign it with a temporary modifier, one to be avoided, but not a permanent tag.
The difference from your examples is that an act or attitude can be racist, but that doesn’t make YOU racist. You are not defined by a single event any more than a single belief defines your broader theology.
Since we are operating in a sectarian environment based on purity tests. Your actions can become irrelevant at any time once someone prominent puts a label on you, be it “communist” or “racist”.
I am not familiar with Chinese philosophy and find your perspective very interesting.
What habit is being changed? Aren't the default names defined by the git software? If so just change the software and push, but what habit was changed? Doesn't change current repos but why exactly is that the problem? If you are trying to set a precedent, i.e. stop the bleeding, then a git update would work just fine. Is it assuming that 'master' should be the default? The name 'master' doesn't have any special significance to the software interacting with it as the branch name is just an identifier. The term 'master' in the Comp. Sci. sense is jargon meaning basically 'the source of truth' not 'one that controls the wills of others'. The only habit I see being altered is to be readily conditioned to accept without question the dictates of political interest groups and large corporations as to what terminology is acceptable. Who defined these groups as the rightful arbitrators of this jargon?
"So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech."
In order words, the next time you have the urge to think critically about what you are allowed to type and who is forcing that decision upon you take a deep breath, shallow your skepticism, and reflect upon whether you have been indoctrinated enough into the new political Zeitgeist.
Just a slight perspective,
I'm not from the US, I'm from israel. We have a black jewish population here, they yearned their return to Zion(israel) for thousands of years.
The state of israel, invested money and effort in organizing their return.
Non of their ancestors were slaves.
We have social issues, mostly because the huge differences in culture and exposure to technological and educational advances. And the fact these people are immigrants. Sure there's racism, and troubles.
But the narrative is completely different from the american narratives. Because of the US hagemony in entertainment and media, you see young jewish black (mostly from ethiopian origin) espousing the American narrative. This is extremely hurtful for their cause as it is not into touch with their reality.
So basically, I hate the american wokeness wars because of the havoc the wreck on non american societies. Not because the blacks in the US are treated fairly, but because the media frenzy is making it impossible to actually get things better.
I see the same thing in the Netherlands; the way some people talk you would almost get the impression that Floyd was killed in Amsterdam or something.
Not that we don't have problems with racism – we absolutely do – but the context and reasons are just completely different to the point where the American conversation on the topic for the most part just doesn't apply at all, but unfortunately not everyone seems to have realized this.
Where does this line of reasoning end? Should we rename "master's degrees" even though there is no "slave" in this context (just like there is no slave branch in git)? I think it's important for students to take a deep breath and remember to reflect upon racism.
For context, I'm Finnish and many of my ancestors were sold as slaves as well.
Can sympathize: the reason Im in the US is because my Irish ancestors went into indentured servitude to come to the states, landed in the deep south and because of my low economic status growing up actually shared more in common with the black folks around here (went to a school system where I, 7/8 Irish, was the minority) yet I'm constantly being reminded by white folks to check my privilege. It's just hilarious from this perspective.
> For context, I'm Finnish and many of my ancestors were sold as slaves as well.
Just wanted to point out there's a huge difference here. Black communities in America very much live with the legacy, and remanifestation (I recommend reading The Color of Law), of slavery in their everyday lives. At one point in US history, nearly 10% of american identified as KKK members. Do you think all of them suddenly disappeared.
There's also huge legacies in our academia. Just a couple decades ago sociology was essentially the study of eugenics in our own country while anthropology was the study of eugenics in other countries. Even commonly used terms in statistics (e.g. regression to the mean) root from the study of eugenics. There's been much scholarship dedicated to clearly tracing these roots and a constant theme of antiblackness
PBS has a great history documentary called "American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade" that I'd highly recommend if you wanna start to dig at the heels of how deeply rooted this is in our culture
It's good that you find this GitHub initiative a useful reminder that racism can run very deep (including apparently harmless language), but for many people it is a reminder that:
- GitHub prefers cheap virtue signaling not only to actually caring about racism, but to technical merit and customer service: the public pays for this PR stunt with *millions* of adjustments to their repositories and working copies
- Branch names, and many other similar things, are now a battleground for freedom of expression, exposed to dangerous storms of political correctness
- GitHub has the arrogance of trying to control how people call their branches, and ultimately people's political ideology through the manipulation of language
For me and many others, the habit that is going to change (maybe slowly) is using GitHub.
> - GitHub prefers cheap virtue signaling not only to actually caring about racism, but to technical merit and customer service: the public pays for this PR stunt with millions of adjustments to their repositories and working copies
Neither git nor GitHub is forcing the branch names to change. git added the ability to specify a default branch instead of hardcoding it to 'master'. Github is taking this into consideration by allowing the users to specify their own default branch as well, and updating documentation and command examples to use 'main' as the default branch name.
> - Branch names, and many other similar things, are now a battleground for freedom of expression, exposed to dangerous storms of political correctness
No freedom of expression concerns here. You actually have more freedom now as git, GitHub, GitLab now make it easier to choose your own default/primary branch instead of hardcoding it to initialize to 'master'.
> - GitHub has the arrogance of trying to control how people call their branches, and ultimately people's political ideology through the manipulation of language
GitHub is not controlling anything. You, like always, can name your default branch 'master' if you want.
Microsoft can't stop publishing shit code full of security holes that get hacked every other day. If you want your software project to go south in a hurry take a dependency on any Microsoft product. This should be reason enough to ditch M$.
Fair enough. American companies (and people) definitely have a home bias. I guess to be constructive, I would suggest that perhaps there are parallels in your country.
> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way.
My guess is that it ingrains a different habit--patting ourselves on the back for 'defeating racism' via some banal change or other. Or worse, that it leads them to write off the whole movement as disingenuous for all of its focus on pointless endeavors. It's probably another drop in the bucket of things that make people actively unsympathetic and perhaps even drives them toward the open arms of the far-right. Call me cynical, but it seems unlikely that any substantial change is going to manifest from this. Just a little more self-righteousness for some people and a little more bitterness for others.
> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way
This is a really interesting framing and I appreciate it.
As a Caucasian American, I have been perplexed by this issue. The terminology change itself didn't especially annoy me - you don't have to change your existing repositories after all - but it didn't seem to really accomplish anything useful. My instinct was that this served no purpose beyond PR ("virtue signaling") and might be mildly harmful at worst (as a distraction from important structural issues, a constant reminder to right-wing people how annoying liberal scolds can be to them) without any upside I could actually envision.
I feel like what you describe was very far from the original intent, whatever it might have been, but I appreciate that it may help in some small way I did not envision.
I agree that it served no purpose, and yet this thread appears to have found one: the virulence of the objection is so out of proportion to the magnitude of the change that it raises the question of just what is really at the root of it.
It is entirely about those "annoying liberal scolds"... and the way anything they say will be turned into an existential crisis. I feel like this is less about any actual change as a constant search for a thing to be aggrieved about, and when found, pounced on with absolutely maximum force.
I think of it as "vice signaling": performing the objections without even a moment's thought, not for the purpose of refuting it but to be seen as being the most, loudest, most obnoxious opposition.
I have an honest question for you and others who are directly impacted by this, and would love to hear your perspective.
I work on a software team that has the usual level of diversity, an almost equal mix of East Asian, Indian, Middle-Eastern, and White developers, a few women, and not a single black developer. Here's the problem though... I've been part of the screening and interviewing process and we've only had ONE black person apply, he was an immigrant from Africa. He made it all of the way through the interview process, but did not get the job for reasons that I am unaware of, though I did give him a yes vote as he seemed competent and friendly to me.
Given that we have screened and interviewed hundreds of applicants and as far as I'm aware he was the only black developer to apply, how can we as individuals on the team make a difference to try to be more inclusive?
This has been true everywhere that I've worked. In my entire career spanning > 25 yrs I've only had the opportunity to work with one black developer. He was extremely good, but timid, very soft spoken, and too quick to self-judge, leading to him not very proactive at advertising his successes, which was unfortunate as he was doing great work, but not recognized by the majority of the team. When I later became his manager I would go out of my way to ensure that every major accomplishment of his was widely publicized, but by then the perception had already been set.
It seems to me that the root problem is further up than the hiring process -- it feels like it's something that needs to start at a younger age, encouraging more people outside of the usual circle to consider tech as a career in the first place, but maybe I'm not blind to my own short-sightedness and would love to be shown where I personally can effect change.
You need to better define the problem you are trying to solve. For example in my team in Europe there is no black member; there is no black person in the entire building and just a few in the entire city, maybe none in this kind of job, so I don't consider we are not inclusive by not having a black member in the team. You can have a problem if you are exclusive, but you cannot force inclusivity for the sake of just doing something that sounds good.
What is the goal of inclusivity? What is better for your team, having the best developers or having the most diverse developers? What is the productivity and value of diverse developers versus expert developers? Is a developer more valuable because of the skills or because of the skin color? Would you want to be treated by a competent doctor or by a black doctor? I am not saying there are no competent black doctors, but you make it sound that color is more important than competence.
black engineers have jobs. the government and defense contractors recruit at schools that have a higher percentage of black software engineers. its not that hard of a concept.
To me, "master" and "slave" are historic terms used throughout electrical, software, even entertainment industries.
Eliminating words from a vocabulary is very 1984-like. Those words have a deep historical meaning, allowing ourselves to just "remove them" is akin to forgetting and ignoring the dark past of slavery, rather than remembering and acknowledging it (with the hopes it will never happen again).
Saying that it helps change habits (in my opinion) is analogous to saying that preventing kids from playing violent video games will reduce mass shootings (there is evidence it does not). I disagree with your premise that this pushes us to change habits and is only a mechanism to be ashamed of our shared (and dark) history. Lest we forget.
Github isn't eliminating any words from anyone's vocabulary.
This thread has demonstrated that plenty of people are committed (har har) to calling their repository's je ne sais quoi branch `master`.
While I'm with you that I don't understand how this will move the needle on racial equity, I'm uncomfortable with how visceral of a reaction a group of technology professionals is having to what is essentially a library changing a default value.
Like, vocabulary changes all the time. Technology changes even more frequently. Why y'all so scared to use a different label?
>So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
This is an extremely privileged and dangerously ignorant point of view.
There are more people living in slavery across the world right now than ever before in human history.
Maybe we should reflect on that fact instead of simply covering up words which make us uncomfortable in a vain attempt to expiate self imposed guilt for being born with a particular shade of skin.
My reaction was to instantly think that I'm on one side trying to get things done and SJWs are on another side slowing me down.
I don't care if it's a new JS library breaking dependencies to support import instead of require or if it's idiots changing names of things. These people are my enemy.
If I already have zero tolerance for whatever virtue signalling crap is popular in the mostly white and affluent San Francisco, is because of behaviours like this one.
On the bright side, this can help more people to discover there is a world outside of the liberal bubble, hopefully contributing to a more balanced society.
I'm white, but first generation immigrant. I think the change that GitHub did is as well for the wrong reasons. It's not because it is offensive, but because it might be reminding people of US history that many people are ashamed of (it reminds me of Aushwitz, the reason the place is still open and allows tourists is so we don't forget about it and won't repeat the history). The master in git wasn't even related to slavery, its meaning comes from meaning like master copy.
I don't mind change if it is for the better, for example postgresql instead of master-slave uses master-standby which is much more accurate how the replication works. Perhaps using main by GitHub is better, but because of timing, it feels like it was made to help forget about that part of the history, which IMO is doing the opposite of what was intended.
I've seen many replies, but not this one, so I'll chime in.
I am not concerned about diversity in tech and this was never on my mind until it started getting shoved down everyone's throat by American companies and activists. Many European countries blindingly copy whatever comes out of the USA, so now it's here too.
For me it's just one more annoying thing I feel that some privileged brats that I never met and don't care to meet are forcing others to spend time on.
While there may be plenty of people of all races who were not offended by the name, when you operate at the scale of a GitHub there is going to be some percentage who are. Some of them will complain. A company like GitHub then has two main options: change the name, or defend not changing the name. Whichever one they pick is going to cause various forms of backlash from various people, but it’s pretty obvious that changing the name is more defensible and the better long-term approach.
>it’s pretty obvious that changing the name is more defensible and the better long-term approach.
Is it the better long-term approach? If you give in to a vocal minority what is stopping them from trying to change something else? Git means "an unpleasant or contemptible person". Surely that could be construed as offensive. What happens when / if a vocal minority decides Git and Github need to change their name? Should Github just change their name to prevent backlash?
Not to mention it appears to be mostly white people pushing this change, not even the alleged victims.
But, this argument rationales mob rule over reason. The name change is defensible to avoid "various forms of backlash from various people".
"Some of them will complain" -- a majority? Then yes, it makes sense to listen and adapt. Or, a loud minority who threatens? I don't believe that the change was made due to any overwhelming user feedback.
If 98% of people vote that something isn't offensive, and 2% vote that it is, and your takeaway from this is "the thing is offensive", then how can anything ever be determined to be not offensive?
> Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech.
This is a useful reminder. It's a reminder that associative thinking can invert causal relationships and turn anything into a symbol for anything else. There is no rational limit to things that can be attacked this way. Someone can demand you to change the way you talk or dress, what you read or watch, how you do your job. The changes themselves can be anything and the only limit to their extent is your willingness to say no.
And by the way, don't ever forget who is enforcing this. This is not your coworker individually asking you do something differently to accommodate them. This is coming top-down from one of largest tech corporation in the world.
Let's not exaggerate, they just changed the default for new repos, everyone is free to continue naming their branches "master" or "stable" or "trunk" or whatever they want.
> This is a useful reminder. It's a reminder that associative thinking can invert causal relationships and turn anything into a symbol for anything else. There is no rational limit to things that can be attacked this way.
I've never heard this stated so clearly and succinctly. Thanks for advancing the conversation.
Remember MS once told us 'Linux is Cancer'. Should we have believed them then? Now 'Microsoft loves Linux'. Which is it? I think which ever one aligns with their business interests at the time. That lens should used to view any change pushed by Redmond.
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech
Yeah, I totally need that, because there is not enough churn in tech. For instance, every release of Android since 4 has been identical in terms of UI, so I haven't had to learn any new subconscious habit in the use of a phone.
Web developers haven't had to learn new framework in over a decade; they could use this, too, not to mention C++ devs.
I was caught off guard by the change when it was implemented, and was frankly quite annoyed. My suspicions were the same as the author's, that the reasons were likely insincere. But I never made the leap you did to (try and) assess my subconscious biases. Thank you for the insight!
On an other note, 'main' is fewer letters to capture the same idea ad therefore more efficient.
It's creepily similar to the indoctrination technique of teaching people they are evil and can only be redeemed by following <belief system of choice>.
Black SWE here as well, highly disagree with this. If Microsoft/Github wanted to issue "a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech", they could've founded an non-profit dedicated to training and job placement for BIPOC and underrepresented white women, they could've kept a continuous banner on their site that linked to relevant legislation, initiatives, causes, etc.
They changed the goddamned name of the master branch.
You're gonna have to explain to me how changing that name makes much more significant headway than any initative I enumerated above or adjacently related. There's a lot of heavy lifting being done by "a useful reminder".
I mean, you or I don't need reminders, that's what the article is about. As for the rest of the tech industry, its a crapshoot to even suggest even half would be moved by changing the name of the branch nevermind possibly not caring at all about the greater issue for whatever reason.
The FTA is about continuous action that requires investment, you're applauding cheap, low-effort PR moves. This country, and you and I, deserve better than what amounts to yet another TikTok affirmation, and it's difficult to discern tangible value for actual Black people that someone somewhere thought to themselves as they typed 'git checkout main', "Ah, yes, let me reconsider the web of power-relations I'm enmeshed in".
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
There is no amount of reflection that is ever going to substitute the actual presence of Black folk in the tech workforce, and thinking we'll over come this waiting on some kind of ethical consensus that eventually leads to a beneficial outcome is not reflected by history, see Civil Rights legislation.
Suggesting you're surreptisously altering behavior via minor language changes is just "spooky action at a distance" come alive. It lends the sense that someone is "effecting" outcomes without actually having to be accountable for actual outcomes occuring.
The "postmodernists" (in quotes cause it tells you nothing, more accurate would be to call them postmarxist) developed something resembling this (predominantly American) language theory, though much broader in scope, looking at documents from the 19th, 18th, and early 20th century when there was a small elite regulating knowledge, language, and education. (the official language academies of France, Spain, early communities of biologists, crimonologists etc). Those conditions simply aren't the case today precisely owing to mass communication.
All this that is accomplished by this (IMO as a former philosophy academic) complete bastardization of so-called "postmodern" language theory is a new out/game for standing institutions to play. The FTA points out how Microsoft is changing the name of master with their right hand, but supplying facial recognition software to police to identify protesters and mistake Black folk for Gorillas with their left hand.
The sad thing is it’s not corporate generosity coming up with these initiatives, they are pushing them because it’s a PR benefit.
Changing the name of something or issuing a press release costs absolutely nothing. When you actually dig into the issue you find corporations have no problem with racist practices if changing them would be expensive or challenging. Running background checks on employees and not disclosing what they will discriminate on, acting like meritocracy is anything more than a fiction, the incredible bias towards hiring from places their friends worked at, etc. And most of big tech are falling over themselves to take contracts from oppressive governments and institutions.
I have to laugh a little when Amazon or Microsoft takes a stand against racism but does business in China, possibly one of the most racist, and human rights abusing government on Earth. Turns out the only thing these companies won’t discriminate against is cold hard cash.
First off. Thank you for your comment. As a white European I need to hear these perspectives and I don't hear them enough.
Your comment reminded me of those email signatures that say something like, "Please think of the environment before you print this." Do they actually accomplish anything or do they just annoy people?
We need to weigh the real impact of actions against their potential annoyance. Because otherwise we're turning people off to the goals we're trying to achieve.
There was recently an environmental action in my city to stop traffic with a banner during a busy Sunday when lots of people were returning to the city. The activists did it because they wanted to get people to notice and care about the environment. The motorists were of course very annoyed and many of them posted on social media about this. Does annoying a bunch of motorists work towards saving the environment or just alienate people who could have been your allies?
There's a similar dynamic happening here.
A name was changed.
The change annoyed some people. Some people were not annoyed.
I just want to quote because in my opinion your last sentence is right on & bears repeating: "The FTA points out how Microsoft is changing the name of master with their right hand, but supplying facial recognition software to police to identify protesters and mistake Black folk for Gorillas with their left hand."
On an individual level, I don't find it useful to get too worked up about name changes. Pronouns, names, whatever -- if someone's got a strong feeling I'll use what they want. You know why? (rhetorical HN you, not imbnwa in particular) Talk is cheap. Follow the money, though, the actual money, and supplying crappy facial recognition software that allows mass surveillance and leads to unsupportable arrest of innocent people is $$$. Selling a shitty "AI" program to screen resumes that uses a model that tells you a name like Jared is the best predictor for getting hired is $$$$. Perpetuating inequality through crappy AI/ML design is $$$$, and then noting that it exists and charging to "fix" it is $$$$$! As the beauty and pharma industries know, the best way to make money is to introduce a problem and then introduce a "cure" six months later.
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute there. I have mexican-indigenous blood running through my veins and coloring my skin and all I can say is this: no matter how much you've suffered, you don't get to minimize other people‘s suffering.
> Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech.
Implicit bias is made to be the boogeyman when it reality, it is probably a very a small fraction of the cause of "lack of diversity" in tech, if at all. Anyone who has attended computer science courses in college anytime would know the number of black students were little to none. It has always been a pipeline problem from the education side of things. To say that typing a word that so happens to have a relation to slavery caused a "lack of diversity" in tech is the biggest farce in this industry and it is extremely sad to see this line parroted by many in the industry. I expect to be heavily downvoted and even flagged for "wrongthink" but I think it tells a lot about how irrational and unhealthy our state of discourse is in today's world.
> remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
I find statements like these to be well meaning straight from the pulpit of a culture that finds cancellation or edits prefferable to new and better.
It's decline. Regression. It's looking at the present solely through the eyes of the past and a refusal to look an inch forward.
A word won't change the state. It's meta. The nub of the issue is that a black kid who might have an interest in computing has access to one, does he have that as a choice, and can anyone help or nudge him towards an academic pursuit in computing. That's where the work is.
> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit
Yes, a habit, but nothing that has to do with race or racism. So, is it a habit worth, or needing of being broken? What was bad about this habit? How does using it in a non-racial context aide in perpetuating racism?
Masters degree. Master recording. Master Chief. Master at Arms. Like Git, none of these things has anything to do with a master/slave paradigm, or even have a "slave" counterpart. There is no slave in git...there is clone and branch. There is no slave in audio recordings, you make a duplicate or copy of the master. Language is complex and nuanced. Not every word used in a race context has to do with the same word being used in another context, unless we make it so. There's nothing consciously or subconsciously racist about saying you have a masters degree, assuming you do. There are many definitions for master[1]. Only one of them deals with the disgusting practice of a person being owned as property, ie slavery, and it's not even the top definition. Should we just get rid of all of the other definitions of the word entirely because one of the definitions has some very disgusting history in the US, and historically the world at large going back thousands of years?
For the record, I'm white. My ancestors were serfs, ie slaves, in Europe. Unless you're of a royal bloodline that wasn't conquered by another royal bloodline, chances are everyone has a connection to relatives that were enslaved by someone, somewhere, at some point in time[2].
Now, I can agree we should get rid of master-slavery terminology. That is blatant, imho. But "master" on its own when there is no "slave" component unless we make one up in our heads? If we follow that logic, there are a LOT of words that we should get rid of, including the word "black" to describe a color. There are a lot of racists who also use that word in a negative context to spread their racism. Where will it end? Where is the line? How much thinner should we make the dictionary so that no one is offended or subconsciously reminded of something that didn't actually have to do with the subject at hand? And after we do that, will there be newly found things that people will get offended at? Count on it.
> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it
This is the entire point, this sentence right here.
The sentence right there is what a lot of people find inane and absurd, though, too. It’s often less a case of people not “getting” what the nominal intention is; it’s that people do get the nominal intention and think it’s an idiotic waste of time that’s being done to satisfy a pretty ignorant and narrow-minded view of language and history. It also has no limiting principle to what gets targeted except the energy of ninnies. It’s worth considering now where your line of tolerance is going to be - the point where you think, “okay, this has become too ridiculous, even for me”. Is it when I suggest removing “chain” from blockchain because it evokes slavery? Point being that many people see this issue with GitHub as having crossed the line of absurdity already.
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
Could you please give me specific examples of what biases I, a software developer, may have? I like to think that I have always treated people with respect, judging them only by the character of their work and interactions with me, as opposed to stereotypes based on characteristics outside of their control. Perhaps I am wrong, but reflecting did not help maybe because I have had found no luck finding a thorough, rational source to educate myself on these issues that doesn't just echo meaningless politically or emotionally loaded statements. I am thus genuinely interested to hear from someone like you who is directly affected by these issues.
I generally agree with your statement. I am also an African American but my first reaction to the change was very positive. On a more technical and pedantic level, having a "master" branch really doesn't make any sense without slave branches. So in this context a "main" branch eliminates any negative historical connotations and has a more precise meaning. To me, this another case of "that's how its always been" and some people react very negatively towards sudden change.
Related to this conversation: years ago Nikon removed the terminology of Master and Slave in their flash units in favor of Commander and Remote.
To the author: We have to start somewhere and it is a sign of progress (no matter how small) that finally there is some awareness around this issue and now something is being done about it
> On a more technical and pedantic level, having a "master" branch really doesn't make any sense without slave branches.
The reason master branches are called master branches is as an analogy to a music/record "master", which means "the original, the truest, the canonical".
(In an analog world where every copy necessitated deterioration, there was a need to say "this is THE version").
So git master branches meant the same thing: canonical. That's why the name "makes sense" even though there are no slave branches.
Just adding this here out of a sense of duty for historical accuracy, and not commenting on the name change itself.
"master" has been in use for decades in the recording industry, the "record master" does not, and never did, have any slaves. This terminology was incorporated into software, back in the CD-ROM days, with their "gold master" from which copies would be produced.
I don't have a horse in this race, I just wanted to point out that the language is far more flexible than some people seem to think.
What's next? Are we going to rename master's as an academic degree? Are we going to start using words other than master or grandmaster to refer to experienced martial artists? What about chess?
> My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone who isn't black.
> My next reaction was, "they may be changing the name for the wrong reasons, but the change is brilliant."
This is exactly what I would expect from a person with a deeply ingrained racial identity.
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
Well, I have reflected upon that, and I came to conclusion that it is people who base their identity on 19th century pseudo-science on kool-aid who are wrong, not me.
That's exactly how I see it too. These performative bits of nonsense are how we as a society build consensus, in this case something like "racial injustice is real, it matters, and it needs to be addressed with action".
And by all getting together and renaming our white/blacklists and master branches and slave devices, we're all agreeing that this is important.
And.... yeah, it's also a way to find the people who aren't willing to mildly inconvenience themselves in this pursuit. Yes, cranky posters like the OP are ALSO signaling with their refusal to go along. What they're telling the rest of us is that this racism stuff isn't something they want to care about.
So it’s a purity test? Many people are just wired to reject this conformist line of thinking from the very starting point. You’re saying, let’s all do this pointless activity so we can see who has an attitude problem. It reminds me so much of how children are treated in schools or churches, and I really chafe at it. I couldn’t care less about your nominal cause or sense of self-righteousness, it’s the attitude and behavior of you imagining your fellow citizens are children that strikes me as offensive and drives resistance. I don’t doubt your good intentions but this way of thinking about solutions (your tools) is rather poisonous and places the banner under which you use them in pretty bad company.
How exactly did it break your workflow? The change only affects new repositories and doesn't prevent you from creating a master branch on those new repositories. You're even able to set any branch name as default on a user, org, or enterprise level.
I don't remember exactly how it broke the first time, but the cognitive overhead shows up in various places. E.g., start a new project, create a branch, then merge back to master... oh wait, it's main now? But then I'm back to an old project, or another person's project, so let me look up what name I need to be using, etc...
I had a bunch of scripts that would automatically clone repos and ensure that they were pointing at the correct branch; they started breaking when the branch names started changing.
This is a thoughtful and patronising post. Since you give advice frelly, let me offer one back: every time you type the word 'slave', take a deep breath and consider the etymology of that word.
This is definitely a helpful perspective, and I'll try to adopt your suggested practice myself.
I don't know that I'd call the change "brilliant", though – for anyone not already seeking to actively reflect on their own subconscious biases, this change will probably feel less like a welcome gentle reminder and more like someone trying to control how they think (which nobody likes).
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
Which sounds okay(1) if all I'm working on is a simple document. If I'm in the larger context of making a change in code because it's breaking something somewhere else, the cognitive overhead of switching gears from "technical mode" to "political mode" to "what the heck was I really doing again?" is costly.
(1) I had "great" but downgraded it to "okay" because literally no one is offended by this -- it's virtue signaling to make rich people feel like they look better.
The word master doesn't occupy this space in my head and never has. I've associated this term primarily with teachers from a very early age. There's obviously the master-slave terminology in tech, but that really doesn't map to slavery in my head. This is probably because I'm from the British Isles which has a very different history in terms of slavery.
For me, I felt this change was really about the impact this term has for people who have been impacted by slavery having to continue to use these terms, which I thought many must felt comes across as, at best, insensitive.
Hence, I felt the cost of doing this seems reasonable. I mean, if we used the term holocaust for wiping a hard drive at some point people would probably have said - "err, yeah, no that's just a bad idea", because it would be offensive.
I did change a name because of this change, but the name I changed was Github. Fuck them and their stupid virtue signalling, because no matter how you cut it, that's really all it is.
"I want to share my own reactions to the name change since this is a really interesting topic. For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves."
Yes and so were the ancestors of every race on this planet at some point.
"So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech"
What exactly am I supposed to be reflecting on? I don't need useless word changes that cause issues at my job to do that. This sort of strange thinking that somehow language causes racism and not the other way around needs to stop. It lacks so much logic it's infuriating, especially for people in tech fields. Additionally, you're simplifying words to one specific meaning when in reality the word master gets used in a multitude of different contexts that don't have any relation to black slavery AT ALL.
How about we do something useful with our time instead of constantly looking for victim hood and racism where it doesn't exist? I guess I should be somewhat encouraged because the fact that people have the time to worry about which words might be offensive (or make things offensive that aren't) means they're doing pretty damn well. So well, in fact, that they don't actually have enough going on in their lives and are making problems where they don't exist. The massive con here though is that eventually if you tell enough people they're victims of a system and can't help themselves it'll eventually cause real societal harm.....
“Yes and so were the ancestors of every race on this planet at some point.”
Great point! Everyone acts like history started in the 19th century. When you take a step back and learn about history on larger spans, it’s obvious that enslavement was common all over the globe. More people should learn that the world slave originates from the ethnic name “slav”, because Slavic people from central and eastern people were frequently enslaved by Moors, who come from the north of Africa.
“The massive con here though is that eventually if you tell enough people they're victims of a system and can't help themselves it'll eventually cause real societal harm.....”
Agreed, and I’m afraid we’ve already reached that point.
I appreciate learning your perspective. Frankly, though, the argument you make for accepting and embracing such things to me reinforces the notion that the BLM movement feels like forced cultural revolution. Though you are not coming across with any such tone, the idea seems like "shut up, and take your medicine".
All cultural revolution is forced for those who do not benefit directly from it.
Nothing worth fighting for comes easy. Women's rights, racial rights, gay rights... It all had to be forced to happen, because it's much easier to maintain an unfair status quo than it is to convince millions of people that perhaps their world view is wrong and holding others back.
I was on the fence before I read this comment. I don't mind changing insignificant things if it makes people feel better.
Now I'm firmly in the camp that this wasn't worth it. Even having this remotely associated with the real important change that BLM is pushing for really dilutes the message. We're talking about a name and not the real injustices that some people face everyday.
Self censorship is never healthy [1]. A default, widely accepted value for the main branch of git repo had immense value from a usability perspective. Creating a confusing system and calling it beneficial because it becomes a reminder about bias as it interrupts your workflow? That's some post modern intersectional bullshit right there.
I really don't care about the name change in this case, the OP was mistaken, master record also has roots in a master slave[tape] relationship. So please, change it, just do it upstream and leave me the fuck out of your culture war.
So you admit that you were not offended by it but would still like it to change and would also impose said change to everyone for a reason that has yet to be identified.
It's extremely disappointing to see that the primary reaction on HN to this terminology chain is to bemoan the minor inconvenience of having to type fewer letters or run a replace-all on your scripts. Oh god, the horror. It's almost like people on HN have never used a text replacement tool before.
A "master recording" is the immutable "official recording" and is the source from which all copies are made, but the "master" in this term comes from the historical use of a "mastering lathe" to create vinyl records. It's quite clear that a "master branch" in git is not like a master recording, because a master branch isn't immutable and moreover is the branch that changes get merged into.
Given that the "master" in historic VCS programs (like Bitkeeper) is explicitly based on master/slave terminology, that git deliberately picked the term to maintain continuity of context with other VCS systems, and that "master" is ultimately a inaccurate description of what a "master branch" actually is in the context of git, it absolutely should be changed to something less inflammatory, like "main" or "working" or "local."
> Given that the "master" in historic VCS programs (like Bitkeeper) is explicitly based on master/slave terminology, that git deliberately picked the term to maintain continuity of context with other VCS systems...
While some VCS programs may have used master/slave (I think maybe CVS did?), BitKeeper did not.
The (likely) basis for the belief that BitKeeper use master/slave and git followed them, the GNOME mailing list post[0] that reignited this discussion in 2019, was retracted the next year[1].
I wrote a summary of the history[2] for Git Rev News, the git developers newsletter. In short, the usage didn't come from BitKeeper, and was intended to mean 'master copy'.
After the article was published, Aaron Kushner from BitKeeper reached out and gave me some more history on the usage of 'slave repository' in that one particular spot in BitKeeper[3]: it was a presentation for a client that was already using master/slave terminology and so the same terms were used in the presentation.
I vehemently disagree. Such virtue signaling is okay when one is on empirically high moral ground. If the lesson were “stay away from snakes” or “stop, drop, and roll”, there would be no possible debate over those topics and we might all agree that a frequent refresher would be welcome.
However, there remains considerable discussion over oppression, race, and politics. For you to shoehorn in your personal viewpoint here immediately ends the discussion and implies that your side is right, when that may not be the case.
Think about if we changed the names literally to “n-word” and “white whip”. You’d be just as disgusted as I am for the opposing side to claim empirical moral high ground and to force you to accept something that you don’t find to be a settled debate.
I think you mean "objectively", not "empirically". Your word choice is problematic as it invokes the authority and propriety of empire as the most rational form of governance. While we're arguing for linguistic purity tests, let's maintain some principled consistency here.
These changes to remove subconscious bias from our language are necessary. They are microaggressions which the average user doesn't even realize exist- but which do harms to some individuals in our society. This may be a minority group within our society- even a very small fraction of a percent- but removing biases which are perceived as harmful is one way that we as an organization demonstrate that we are being actively inclusive to all, instead of falling back on habits developed to favor, or carrying the embedded biases of, one social or cultural group.
I look at it like ADA requirements for language. If you have a curb a wheelchair user can't climb, that's a harm to that individual- and so we require actions, by law, to ensure that wheelchair users are accommodated in our society. 30 years ago the similar complaints were made against ADA ramps, handicap-accessible restrooms, etc.- that they weren't really necessary because the minority who were being hurt by their absence were such a minority, and weren't really the target served population of the organization, etc. That was anti-inclusivity- and so we passed the ADA and support accessibility for all in our organizations- and nobody these days chafes at it at all, for the most part.
Removing harms from how organizations execute their business operations is part of inclusivity. It's not cargo culting, it's not engaging in a self-pleasuring but pointless behavior, it's not a meaningless act that carries no value- it's ensuring that our organization does as little harm to folks as possible as we move forward doing business in the world.
I'm not entirely sure I can disagree with you more.
> Removing harms from how organizations execute their business operations is part of inclusivity. It's not cargo culting, it's not engaging in a self-pleasuring but pointless behavior, it's not a meaningless act that carries no value- it's ensuring that our organization does as little harm to folks as possible as we move forward doing business in the world.
Serious question - What harm are you removing here?
Let me ask again - Who is being harmed, how is this helping them?
Because to me... I see a giant company (MSFT) using political theatre as advertising.
Worse, as a developer in one of the areas that's actually fairly racially diverse (South Atlanta) I sure as fuck don't see any of my black co-workers doing anything other than roll their eyes at this.
This was a change engineered by white people, to appeal to white people's current sense of morality, so that a large company can continue its practices of fucking minority and non-white folks over, and yet here you are congratulating them on wasting billions of dollars on it.
Your entire theory ascribes a mysticism to language that is not evidence based at all.
Changes to language like removing the term master are absurd and performative. You have jumped onto a movement that is operating like a religion. Telltale signs are capitalization of certain words that aren't normally capitalized, and making a big deal about certain interchangeable words.
Growing up as an evangelical Christian I was not allowed to say the word lucky and was insisted that I would say blessed instead. The people who were a minority of my church that made a big deal this did so for personal gain in the social hierarchy.
You can sit here and moan all day long about stupid theories that came out of disciplines in universities where the practitioners are universally illiterate in statistics.
At the end of the day the entire theory is rooted around essays and very very shaky implicit bias science where the test which I have taken several times are not reproducible for a single individual. Depending on the day I take an implicit bias test I am either anti-black or anti-white.
Naturally there's no implicit bias test that has other races featured because these all came from US universities who have a myopic view on race driven by politics and title 9.
Enjoy your silly religion. The rest of us are going to set about building a better world for everyone while you ride along on the technical progress and its fruits.
>They are microaggressions which the average user doesn't even realize exist- but which do harms to some individuals in our society.
Just so I'm understanding this point of view correctly, every time I or any other dev types git checkout master, a micro-aggression is taking place and someone somewhere is indirectly suffering?
I just can't take that line of thinking seriously, I'm sorry.
The problem I have with this name change, and reasoning like this, is that there is no "slave" component of the master branch convention. There is no reference to slavery. My understanding is that it's taken from the way records are made, by using a "master" copy which is copied. Should that change?
Should all uses of the word "master" be changed? Is the main character of the Halo games a microaggression? Metallica's "Master of Puppets"? Is "master bedroom" a microaggression?
Like the author said, it just feels like a meaningless gesture so people can feel better about themselves without fixing any real issues.
Can you name a single person the term 'master branch' has hurt?
Your subconscious bias of being an oppressor is showing. You are pushing your views onto others. This is what some slave owners tried to do. Maybe you should check your privilege and stop engaging in microaggressions before accusing everybody else of doing the same.
I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote.
It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.
For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.
Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear of getting targetted by a vocal but ultimately small 'woke' crowd (there, another label, but at least a bit more specific than just generally someone who wishes to achieve basic goals like welfare, equality, and regulation of private industry). It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
In debates like this sometimes a small number of loud, well-meaning but naive people get much more influence than they should for fear of the other being painted the bad guy, while a significant number of people who are actually affected by the underlying issues don't get heard at all.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology
I don't have the experience of any other group doing this. I agree that it is not inherently a political ideology.
The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal. I think it is important to say that because I know people in other parts of the country that see these as insults and would be surprised to know that people commonly self-identify as these terms.
I find that this group thinks their behavior is better and more helpful than apathy, "silence", and the idea of rampant exclusionary hate from the right. When its really not better, its different, but its not more helpful. There is absolutely a constant threat from people afraid of bird watchers in a park, people that blend into their ranks and are willing to weaponize their understanding of race, two seconds after donating to the Democratic Party.
This goes way beyond just trying to get ahead of a potential PR disaster. I can think of nobody out there in non-nerd world that would've raised a stink about the word "master" being used in some programming context, just like they haven't raised a stink about the term MC. This is ultra-woke privileged white tech lefties who truly do feel like their fighting for social justice by doing this kind of thing.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
> It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
If you combine both the statements, you are committing a no true Scotsman fallacy.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
That's missing polsci 101, left/right exist, that's why they have names, not the opposite.
Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.
Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.
If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it. You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd to not be counted as racists.
It's in everyone's power to start extinguishing the extremes. Until then, I'll take silence on your nearest extreme as your tacit approval of it.
Calling welfare or regulation "basic goals" is misleading: the first is not basic as there is no right to welfare, but forcing others to support welfare while regulation is not a purpose by itself, it is a means to achieve specific goals.
Seeding wrong ideas in what seems to be a neutral context is not nice™.
>you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think
To switch things around for perspective:
"There's nothing wrong with being white and you should be proud of your race."
Yep, if a black person told me this it would be patronizing, and if a white person told me this I'd assume they're racist. Swap white for black in my quote, and it's what the white community in the US is effectively telling the black community, if not in such obvious terms.
It's precisely because of systematic racism that we white people get to share our "sage advice" on how to combat racism, while being almost totally ignorant on the subject. It's proof of privilege and hideously condescending.
Perhaps, in the spirit of sharing useful insight within these kinds of discussions, as a black American you could educate me about something?
For context, I am neither black nor American, I have little time for woke virtue-signalling and fake outrage, but I do want to be properly respectful of others whose background and sensitivities aren't necessarily like my own. With that in mind, I often find socially acceptable terminology around race confusing.
For example, take the word "color". I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable, nor why one of the most prominent advocacy groups still uses the former term in its name. There is so much unconstructive commentary about this particular example that it's hard to figure out what the relevant history and genuine sensitivities are here. Can you enlighten me?
It's just symbolic, and still part of a consensus forming continuum based on advances in communication across large landmasses.
Black people in America are from many different cultures and are simply people that noticed that they had a shared experience of being excluded from institutions and even entire states.
The terminology simply comes from individuals taking initiative in the moment and saying "they treat everyone that looks like us all the same and we need umbrella terms to acknowledge our shared circumstance so that its easy to refer to ourselves". Other non-black people already had terms for us and these terms were typically also used in the pejorative. Many people consider "black" to be an affliction even today. So what you have is that some black people reject those older terms, some people try to repurpose and "take back" those older terms, some people create new terms, most terms are still in use.
These aren't scientific terms, but they do permeate into academia to convey a shared concept. So there isn't much to read into it except learning what the consensus is, and the history of why it is. But trying to merge it into the lexicon based on pattern recognition with other words will only confuse you.
> I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable
Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]
This is an example of the "Euphemism Treadmill." Words that refer to things that some portion of society hold negative views about acquire negative connotations over time. These words are then discarded by polite society for clean new words without the baggage. E.g. latrine to water closet to toilet to bathroom to restroom, or retarded to mentally handicapped to developmentally disabled. See: https://aeon.co/essays/euphemisms-are-like-underwear-best-ch...
Reminds me of the Netflix film, White Tiger. A liberal Indian-American woman comes to India, pretends to care about how the lower castes of India are treated as slaves, but in the end, is just going through the motions and leaves a servant with pocket change. In the end, not treating them as people, but as objects to funnel their morality and values.
Malcom X said it the best. The White leftist liberal is the biggest oppressor in the room. By declaring they speak for the oppressed they've essentially silenced them.
And lets be honest. Changing one word that annoyed a few dozen of people because they think of slavery, well, thats a lot of change just because a shit excuse, that will not matter in the end.
In all fairness, this sort of silly business is more representative of the "Twitter left", comprised of cogs in a perpetual rage-inducing machine, than it is of "leftists" whose main objective is to address the limitations of capitalism, at varying degrees of willingness to work within the system vs burn it down.
Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.
I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something "main" or "master".
This is some technocrat fiction that has failed time and time again. There are towns in the US right now which actively reject help if it's not coming in the form of "more coal jobs" (which aren't coming back regardless of how much coal mining is actually on).
Economic incentives don't change people's minds, they motivate them to double-down on their biases.
Billionaires capitalize on identity politics and political division because it gets them advertising dollars. That's it. While I agree that economic policy certainly merits more discussion, an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about "the elite" isn't any more productive than an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about white people.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
Maybe because the country is blocked in a two-party systems? In other democratic countries, you do not have "the left" represented by one single entity. You instead have a multitude of political parties that can negotiate with each others to push for their political goals. That makes the political landscape dynamic, new parties are created, reorganized, disbanded all the time.
In the US, if you are generally more aligned with the democratic party but see some changes you disagree fundamentally with, you either suck it up or give up your ideals and switch to the complete opposite (republican party).
They are. For example Seattle has a council member from the Socialist Alternative party. There are a few Democratic congress representatives that are socialists (both in state and national level). Some socialist policies have successfully been pushed by socialist party members (e.g. the current medicare for all bill has around 100 democratic house members backing it up).
However the confinement of the current democratic system in the USA today simply doesn’t allow for third parties to gain national traction. There are mathematical models that proves this fact. For the real left to get socialist parties to the national assembly some democratic reforms needs to happen first.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US.
There are. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown a lot over the past few years. They even managed to get four member elected Congress this last election cycle.
It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
I have no evidence, but I suspect McCarthyism and the following hard crackdown on leftists that followed during the cold war greatly slowed down this "natural" growth. It took a generation removed from the cold war for this growth to start up again.
It's because of the 2 party system we are stuck with.
Democratic Socialists, Social Liberals, NeoLibs, and NeoCons(because of the Republican party's shift to the right) are all stuck under one party, so the biggest group controls the entire thing.
I really appreciate this post. Somehow I think the media and its funders are trying to drive the wedge between similarly thinking people as hard as they can.
Do you think that there's a difference with using "master" for the main branch vs using "blacklist" for stuff you don't want in your system? Or are they equally non-offensive to you?
Please let "blacklist" and "whitelist" die. I'm not sure whether the terms carry racial baggage or not, but I don't need to be. I have to repeat the logic of which means which in my head every time. It's as bad as "false negative" and "false positive" -- which means what, again?
"allowlist", "blocklist", "denylist", whatever. They all mean something. I know that "blacklist" is used in a number of areas (blacklisted authors etc.), and I don't have much trouble understanding it there, but those uses also come with a whole set of connotations that don't necessarily apply to lists of URLs or whatever. It's a stretch too far for my brain to be able to hop over without thinking it through.
(For the record, I'm also all in for "false alarm" in place of false positive, and "missed bug"/"undetected flaw" for false negative in the context of static analysis where it makes sense.)
it will take more than a piecemeal approach of rewriting the English language to address prejudice
it is part of an effort of acknowledging that things white are seen as good or less bad, and things black are seen as bad and worse, and this is consistent across the language
this particular approach of extrapolating that towards skin color and ethnicity is just as misguided
but I could have seen it coming: when I’ve used the words in context before, it becomes clear people have had race on their mind the entire conversation that they try to make a poor joke about the irony of me using those words. Seemingly for their own comfort.
Not exactly what I would call privilege, in America.
I think important to distinguish between the radicals and the reasonable people. I would consider myself left but find this change ridiculous. Similar to e.g. how the American concern around blackface is pushed around the world and has madethe dutch Zwarte Piet or German equivalents 'offensive' (even as they probably relate to charcoal burners ('Köhler') [1]).
You equate the few radicals that see some issue there with all 'on the left' which is presumably 50% of any population.
Similar to veganism: the joke is that vegans are all very vocal about being vegan. But reality is that you simply don't notice all the ones that aren't vocal about it and silently love their lives or focus on other issues. Its just an issue of availability bias [2].
> Traditionally, Zwarte Piet is black because he is a Moor from Spain. However, since the late twentieth century the common explanation of Zwarte Piet's blackness has been that it is due to the soot on his body acquired during his many trips down the chimneys of the homes he visits. Those portraying Zwarte Piet usually put on blackface and colourful Renaissance attire in addition to curly wigs and bright red lipstick. In recent years, the character has become the subject of controversy.
No, I equate it as an accurate criticism of the left.
As in, it isn’t an inaccurate criticism. It would be nice if the various camps just acknowledged their criticisms based on accuracy.
Yes, a few predictably present radicals does make it an accurate criticism. It would be more difficult to predict this kind of behavior from people identifying as “the right”. They do other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the latter, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the former that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform.
As an outsider, watching Americans complain about political fatigue is fascinating, and informative. Very clearly there is a pervasive feeling that the political apparatus of America is ineffectual. But instead of seeking to become engaged, many are sucked in by media rhetoric that assigns blame to a menacing adversarial out-group.
> It's not pervasive corruption that's to blame, it's the evil culture of people not like you and their corrupt representatives!
We have this where I live, but thankfully we also enjoy a fair amount of mobility; it's less common to be entirely surrounded by those who vote the same as you, and most ridings have flipped between two or three parties over the coarse of most constituent's lifetimes. While the ethnic diversity of the ridings has generally increased over the same time.
Americans could use more political diversity; you're choosing between neocons and neoliberals, and fighting visciously against each other to do so.
Yeah the whole thing is really becoming a meta-commentary on the entire US political system. If it weren't so bizarre and dangerous, it would be really fascinating to watch (speaking as an American). On some level, many are subconsciously realizing the majority of both parties represent essentially the same geopolitical worldview that neither left nor right really agree with anymore (for different reasons). If this were a different country I'd predict a major political realignment on the horizon, but given how ingrained the respective neo-con/liberal ideologies are in the political infrastructure here ... I just don't see it as likely without something catastrophic happening to force the issue.
Mixing the politics of the day with business is bound to result in a bunch of low-effort “equal justic initiative” black and white styles block divs.
The best thing a company can do the way I see it is to _dedicate_ a cut of regular profit to a black charity. Like, on a regular basis.
Money can affect serious change in the right “hands”.
JUST MOVE MONEY TO BLACK CHARITIES OR ASSOCIATIONS. ITS CALLED DIVISION OF LABOR. Then, do your best to be inclusive intentionally. That’s the answer IMO.
Its actually not a statement about what I personally do, it gives context to why black Americans and other people of color would and have, at the surprising surprise to seemingly everyone.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
As one who leans towards the left, I can reassure you that I've never told anybody what to think, nor have I been vicariously offended, and I barely communicate anything to anybody, which renders my "signaling footprint" pretty darn small. I'm doubtful that those are fair generalizations, and skeptical of critical signaling theory.
I read about the GitHub name change, then completely forgot about it until I saw this HN thread. At the time I think I asked our internal Git guru if this was going to change anything, and he said don't worry about it.
My concern is that a few gaffes from here and there are combined into some unifying characteristic of my "wing," when most people simply take little or no notice of them.
I think you're right about that. Coupled with the fact that extremes from both "wings" are, despite being quite small, very loud and have the megaphone of the news media and social media to make them seem larger than they really are.
White guy here, just wanted to chime in and say HELL YES, you nailed it bro. There's more of an emphasis in "tech" toward appearing "woke" than ACTUALLY SOLVING THE FUCKING PROBLEM. You nailed it with "you/they don't see us as equals [...]".
The most important word in the term "African Americans", to me, is, "AMERICANS". You're in this with us. You're our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. We're in this TOGETHER. And this woke-ism bullshit is just that: bullshit.
Changing a primary branch name from "master" to "main" isn't solving the damn problem. Execs want to do this to earn PR points and wash their hands of the issue of a lack of representation and equality in the industry as a result. It's cheaper than actually giving a shit. But the reality is that socioeconomic barriers to entry into high paying STEM roles amongst our African AMERICAN friends/colleagues is a very real problem that needs to be addressed on both a cultural and economic level.
Ya'll are every damn bit as capable as the rest of us and I'm fucking tired of seeing you thrown under the bus in this industry, especially under the guise of "woke"-ism. It's time we start tearing down these PR stunts as the falsehoods that they are and insist on real, monetary, quantifiable and results-driven investments in black communities that are damn well deserved.
And to my colleagues in the industry that are non-black (especially white): it's time we stand up and "get their back" for our black friends, colleagues and family members. We're in this together, and it's well past time we stand up for our fellow Americans. This bullshit charade needs to stop and WE have the power to move things forward into an era of REAL representation and fairness, and as such we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do it. Enough talk - it's time to act.
"left" indeed -- I have been a pretty radical socialist since I was 16. (Well, at least on paper, I haven't been done activist work for years) ... And I don't recognize myself in this "left" that people keep talking about. I think it's hilarious to call CNN "left" or think that anybody in GitHub leadership is "left" for relabeling git branches. Plz. It's just a proposterous strange (and uniquely American) partitioning of the world.
If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.
So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)
If you want to understand why Biden and Obama are called socialists, I suggest you do some reading of the Anarcho-Capitalist literature (Anatomy of the State is the most obvious) or maybe listen to someone like Peter Schiff.
I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.
The actual (socialist) American left (think AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) calls this liberalism, and complains that it is more about posturing than actual change. So this is only a criticism of the left if you are very far to the right.
the point is that it was identified as an area of change at all, when given the reasons for doing so it is completely vacuous and existing in the absence of other change, but being used to satisfy a checkmark of change and self-congratulate.
Absolutely. The paternalism that's shown toward black Americans by white Americans on the left is so obvious. They're treated like children. This patronizing stance toward blacks is like a continuation of the general pre-Civil War ethos of the Democrats. You "took care" of your slaves, too. They were your "property", after all. But of course, you didn't really want to help your slaves in any real way, lest they forget their place.
As an independent who has both democratic party and liberalism as my part of my makeup I have to say this overcompensation from the far left is nuts. It's some kind of white man's guilt complex. I believe everyone is created equal and we have to always be diligent about keeping that at the forefront, but the terms master/slave and their ilk (in english) were around looooong before the whole white/black slave travesty happened. The same with white/black list. Until I hear some prominent black leaders sayign the community at large has an issue with it then I don't really care what some blogger or guilt stricken white people say. It's overcompensation and cancel culture all rolled into one.
As a white dude, I feel extremely proud because my ancestors abolished slavery.
Oh wait no I don't, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.
Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don't care what it is called), I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause. It is a bit complicated as the name change in itself is not bad, but given the context, and that it distracts from addressing real issues it actually is.
Same thing with plastic recycling, in and of itself it is better than landfill, but as it allows us to feel good and look away from the real problem (plastic is cheap because most impacts are externalized) the recycling of plastic contributes more to the problem than to the solution. I know people who traveled around the world about once a year, own a big house and altogether have a pretty big impact that could easily be reduced, but they do recycle plastic and think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
> I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause
Came here to express similar opinion and your articulation has succinctly and perfectly captured it so I'll just add to it.
Over the years I've come to realise that effecting real change to address the root cause is hard. It almost certainly won't be done by private corporations; the changes need to be enforced by (and at) institutions that are answerable to communities e.g., right to quality education, a humane law enforcer. Not only is change going to be hard but slow as well. However with more and more institutions getting privatised (private jails, contracted police force etc.,) whose sole motive is to earn more profits I don't see how anything is going to improve in the near future. So what ends up happening is every atrocity against oppressed community gets hijacked by these private mega-corps as they sense PR opportunity.
To take another example; Diversity & Inclusion. We do all the song and dance at the workplace to make it more diverse. But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person. The reasons are obvious, the entire education system (and society to an extent) is so rigged against oppressed community that it takes a miracle for one of their community to even make it to resume-writing stage. Instead of addressing the problem at the root cause (make it easier for them to get high quality education, lead a decent life) every corporation makes a big PR-noise around D&I while in reality the work place continues to be non-diverse. Net result is we end up having debates like "why should we reduce interview bar", "it's unfair to the deserving candidates" while completely being blind to the root cause of the problem.
> But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person.
I agree based on my personal experiences.
One of the concrete suggestions by the author of the blog post really strikes me as a step that we could implement, but we don’t: drawing from non-traditional backgrounds. And it’s because it’s an uphill battle. Much easier to do some low hanging fruit.
I’m not a minority in tech, but coming into my current job I had a semi-traditional background. Even getting first rounds was a struggle, only ameliorated by having a professional network of tech people, which is very much not something that you can expect a non-traditional candidate to have.
Seriously, my “get to phone screen” rate without network referrals was around 2-3%. With referrals was about 60%. That’s how bad it gets. So now when it’s in my direct control I go out of my way to look for non-traditional backgrounds in the pipeline and give them the benefit of the doubt during resume screening, paid for in hours I spend interviewing instead of programming
This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop. I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
> think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
Well, I guess they're more environmentally responsible than if they weren't recycling plastic. It's better to do something, however small, than nothing, surely? (And I doubt their environmental footprint even registers in the grand scheme of things - it's industry we need to shame, not individuals for the moment.)
[1] Who wasn't already heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery, etc., I suppose.
There is a chasm between “doing something like this distracts from more effective options for change” and “people can only do one thing at a time”, and arguing the latter when someone says the former feels disingenuous.
For example, in California, due to long term drought, urban water usage legislation was enacted. Urban water usage in California accounts for less than 10% of the state’s total usage, so a 20% reduction, at significant personal impact to urban residents, has a sub 2% impact on total use. However, it also gives the appearance that the legislature is actively engaged in addressing the problem of water conservation to under-informed voters without compelling those legislators to address agricultural and manufacturing uses (and their organized lobbying efforts).
The problem with “every little bit helps” mentalities is that they enable perverse outcomes when coupled with limited information decision making, finite resources, and multiple concerns to balance. All of this leads to the politically optimal (and thus career sustaining) option set being deeply suboptimal application of resources.
> I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
Surprisingly, human minds do seem to work that way. After doing a "good" deed, we're liable to believe that we've done our part, and owe society no further action. Even if our good deed didn't actually change anything.
> I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
This is exactly what people do. WAY too many people do "feel-good" charity work. They just pick something that's visible, easily partaken and then decide they're "helping" and go about their lives feeling better.
Like donating clothes to Africa, which actually harms the local economy[1][2]. As does dumping tons and tons of food without proper end to end oversight.
Or having a demonstration in a public location, bothering the end-users or workers of a business. Because it's easy and good publicity. They don't attack the people on top who actually make the decisions, because it's hard and boring work.
> imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop
A lazy and overused argument. No one said only one thing can be done. Fact is time and attention are resources and by doing some thing you allocate less of them to other things.
Americans at large are heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery.
Our President still lives in a house built by enslaved peoples. Our Congress still legislates in a Capitol built by enslaved peoples.
That fact remains true, and is the prima facie evidence that all Americans have profited from our legacy of slavery, and that we aren't all that concerned with tearing down that legacy and eliminating the harms to folks that those monuments contain... instead a plaque or statue explaining the role of the enslaved peoples is enough.
You don't. Nobody does. The plastic you "recycle" gets turned into lower grade plastic and so on until it gets landfilled. For plastic, the only way is down.
Steel, aluminium and glass are examples of materials that are recyclable.
I separate plastic so it can be either burnt together with my other trash, or shipped to Turkey where god knows what environmental crime is committed with it. An extremely small percentage might be melted into some low grade park bench. Absolutely zero plastic will be turned into high quality plastic pellets for industrial as a substitute for new plastic. It does not make me feel good, but not doing it makes me feel worse.
I just voted today for real change. Voting matters, plastic "recycling" doesn't*
* if you live in a place where you have meaningfully different options, not just two flavors of the same
> this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause
The root cause can't be addressed by the same people who reap the benefits of this system, because it's so deep in its core that it would require substantial change, possibly breaking the system itself.
Off-topic, but I really enjoy products whose packaging I can dispose of well because it's all paper and/or metal. I buy Celestial Seasonings tea because there's no foil, and I can compost the tea bags. But there are still plenty of products that I only find in plastic, like frozen fish. I mainly shop at Wal-Mart because I'm poor. Does anyone have any tips for someone on a low budget?
I think such a change generates awareness. A lot of problems linger in the tech sector I'm not really aware of. The write up of the article author sheds light again on biased recruitment in the tech sector. Something that appears to be a fundamental problem with the education sector in the US being broken.
But it is good awarness? The major awarness people get from this cases is not about actual problems, but about very questionable wording-problems and behaviour of certain people. Not sure whether this at the end not creates more hate&blind eyes than important awarness.
For smaller scripts, this is trivially resolved. For larger scripts, this is a bug, and the script should be updated with a more flexible solution that doesn't rely on hardcoded branch names.
> “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder”
Crazy idea: if companies that do virtue signaling on inclusivity were paying their taxes, decent schools could be funded and we would not have so many of those issues.
But instead, those companies are actively lobbying to avoid any taxes, and as a result, poor kids will never have any chance of getting a decent education:
I am baffled by the naivety of people in our IT industry who swallow the hypocrite "inclusivity" discourse of those big tech giants. They don't care about inclusivity, they only care about money folks.
It's always when government screams around elections that they will increase taxes for the rich, the middle class and small to medium business cry.
I am yet to see the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google pay their fair share. Meanwhile small and medium businesses have hard time to compete because of the increasing burden bestowed upon them.
The big corporations work hard to gatekeep their wealth garden, so no outsider could ever join them.
I will vote for any government that will promise to partition those companies, make them pay the tax they ought to pay had they not used accounting tricks and finally to ban selling personal data for advertising purposes.
I don't think companies paying their taxes - in the USA at least - would help much on the education side of things, because much of the USA has a stunningly bad system of using property taxes to pay for schools.
So schools in rich areas get more money than schools in poor areas.
Charging companies taxes and simultaneously reforming how schools are funded could work?
I imagine changing the funding mechanism would be extremely politically unpopular with homeowners who's property values are attached to the quality of their local schools.
> because much of the USA has a stunningly bad system of using property taxes to pay for schools.
This might have been true once upon a time, but pushes in State and Federal funding over the last couple of decades have mostly filled in the gaps. Take a careful look at district funding per-pupil in your state and you might be surprised. While there certainly are differences, they are nowhere near as large as they were in the past.
There is another problem regardless of how good education you get chances are you'll become a wage slave. The harder you work, the increasingly more tax you have to pay, so making effort does not pay these days. Then you have things like illegal drug market teasing the youth, as the margins are high and tax free. I thing just making the schools better will not have much effect, because young people have no motivation to do better as they'll have mediocre lives regardless of how much effort they put in education as the system is designed for the poor to stay poor.
The USA spends more per capita than anyone else and we get worse results.
More money isn't going to fix it.
We need to break up the teacher's unions and put competition into the education marketplace by supporting students not schools.
If we gave every student a stipend that their parent's could use to pick the school they wanted, then our education system would have competition and actually get better.
As a Canadian who's spent some time in various parts of the States, I would say the biggest change that needs to be made is a greater cultural value being placed on good education. In simpler terms, I believe disadvantaged youth will do better at school when those youth start _wanting_ to go to school.
The most successful ethnic group in the United States are Nigerian-Americans because in Nigerian society, education is valued above all else. 61% of Nigerian-Americans over 25 hold a Masters degree - a remarkable number!
To give a personal example-- the public school I graduated from has a racial busing program from a school district that spends $24k per student to a school district that spends $15k per student.
Many US cities have tried to throw money at this problem with little to no success. I don't claim to know the answer, but we should at least stop pretending we have it already.
I think the "per capita" bit is misleading. Because it lumps in certain area with other areas.
Certain school districts are way underfunded compared to others. Part of that problem is that a lot of school districts are funded through property taxes. Which has a way of reinforcing the cycle of poverty.
Your voucher system would simply exacerbate the problem. You know what happens when you allow people to be selective about their schools? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
In your case, it would just be a move to private schools and if you don't think those people wouldn't be able to vote out all taxes that go to schools now, then you are naive.
And breaking up the teachers' unions? Yeah. That's a race to the bottom. Already schools in those underfunded districts do their best to discourage long-tenured teachers as their pay is directly related to years of service. Make it easier for schools to churn teachers and that's exactly what you'd see. Not a selection for the "best", but for the cheapest.
Education is a service with no direct material benefit. Investing in it does not pay off any particular person or group in any noticeably tangible way. However, having a well-educated population benefits everyone and everything.
Education is one area where we probably need less privatization rather than more.
Therefore we shouldn't address the fact that corporations aren't paying their taxes? We could also put more money into the pockets of parents by easing their tax burden...
Whilst I agree that they should pay their taxes, let's not get confused here: no matter how much the budget is increased, education will not be properly funded because it's not a political priority. Most countries with better education systems don't really invest _that much_ more than the USA, but it's the attitude towards education that counts.
Looking at absolute funding is a bit simplistic in this instance. The problem OP is pointing towards is that some schools are disproportionately bad. In an unequal society where distribution is racially biased, an education system might be superbly funded, while still leaving several district underfunded, yielding the racial bias OP was taking about.
You seem to imply that every tech worker is pro-tax breaks (they are not).
In fact, it's perfectly possible to disagree with your company's policy on taxes, and agree with their policy on inclusivity! In fact, these tech workers have almost no control over the taxes their company pays or doesn't pay!
I think many people here would agree with me: I'd be happy if tax laws were changes to make big companies pay more! I would never expect anyone to quit their jobs because they disagreed with how their company filed their tax return. That's just a kind of insane way to think about the world. A worker only has one bargaining chip: they can quit. That's an unreasonable ask.
> companies that do virtue signaling on inclusivity were paying their taxes, decent schools could be funded and we would not have so many of those issues.
So the biggest issue I have with this is that the US government is really good a pissing away money on useless stuff. Take a look at the latest round of "stimulus" and the breakdown of where everything is going.
> So while the tech community was rushing around, trying to do their best impression of a black square post on Insta I remember thinking, “oh for fucks sake, they’ve completely missed the point”. Why? They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community.
In practice, big techs don't care about POC, they care about mobs.
"Inclusive" words is just what make mobs happy and it's cheaper to do than being accused of discrimination for real reason: POC representation in big tech.
Changing a default branch name is cheaper than try to fix the real world.
That's the point, and that, unfortunately, the reason why the situation will never change: Because we act only on the exposed representation; movies, text on web site, etc.
It is the currently accepted term on the Euphemism Treadmill. In my lifetime alone I have seen it go through colored people (perhaps the original source of your discomfort? and the "CP" in "NAACP"), Negro, black, Afro-American (which was brief but it doesn't mean I didn't have to rename a lot of anchor texts when the academic departments changed names to ...), African-American, then back to black, people of color, now finally capital B Black, with "people of color" apparently now a broader term of usage.
Great question about the term "people of color". Reminds me of when Apple posted on their home page, "Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. For equitable education. For a more just justice system. And for Black and Brown businesses.". The part that particularly rubs me the wrong way is the term "Brown" people. And it’s uppercase. Who wants to be called a "Brown" person? I’ve never heard anyone called that before in my life. It’s incredibly degrading and reductionary. If I am Mexican or Indian, the last thing I want to be labeled is "Brown". Thanks for reducing me down to a single divisive term. What is perplexing is that somehow this term is ok and so is "black" and "white". But saying "yellow" or "red" is offensive. This inconsistency is absurd. Those that are pushing this language somehow think they are morally superior to those of the past. But in reality, they have stepped right into their way of thinking — seeing people by "color" and categorizing society based on it.
It's a strange thing, I've been having to do training sessions explaining that instead of saying "blind people" you have to say "people who are blind" because the former apparently projects more about their identity when it's important to underline that this attribute does not define them
Basically there's a movement to shift from inheritance to entity component, wanting to implement people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions. This enables data oriented optimizations so that society executes more efficiently & can be more easily extended as new requirements are submitted by the mob
> Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US?
I'm not English native so that could be the wrong term, not trying to offend anyone. In this context, I mean "discriminated persons/peoples".
IIRC, I saw this on the rules of r/publicfreakout (stating that videos representing "POC" would be moderated). For me "POC" means "Proof Of Concept", so I asked and discover it was about "Person Of Color" and so I use this on English spoken Internet.
But I agree, it's a weird term and I never use this in my native language. Each country have different way to talk about racism and discrimination because each country have it's own racism and discrimination problems.
Yes. Just think of it as a formalism - it's the currently culturally accepted term if that's the group you're trying to reference.
Lots of languages have a fuzzy formal/casual split where usage is both context-based and a matter of respect, though I think the US is more unique in (1) the degree of energy focused towards coming up with formal names for demographic groups and (2) making them out of words that are also used casually.
It’s been a self label for some time. Given the fact that there is a lot of horizontal aggression built into The System, getting everyone to pull in more or less the same direction is progress in its own right.
The terminology seems to be shifting to BIPOC, to include Indigenous peoples. I haven’t heard an a explanation for why Black is also split out.
POC means people of color, aka non-white, yes? There's a lot of Indian and east Asian representation in the tech workforce. You should be more specific about what you mean.
Big tech better make sure that they don't fly too close to the sun. The sun being socialist takeover of the U.S. (i.e. true progressives, whose links to socialism are undeniable, taking over the democratic party). Because most of them would not came out of that transformation unscathed.
> Out of curiosity I asked my manager, who is like 20 yrs older than me, if he had ever been stopped and searched, he said not once in his life.
I had a similar conversation when a black colleague was late for work, having been stopped and searched by the police in London.
The other 10 (white) developers were all shocked, but he said it as casually as someone might report they'd missed the train, or had a puncture on a bicycle. He was stopped regularly, nothing to be done about it.
No one else had ever been stopped.
(A few months later, one of these white developers and I were walking away from the office when the other guy was stopped by the police. They searched his backpack on suspicion of theft. They told us the description was "white youth, short black hair, red football shirt, riding a blue mountain bike with a black backpack", which exactly matched my colleague.)
The government figures say, from April 2019 to March 2020:
> there were 6 stop and searches for every 1,000 White people, compared with 54 for every 1,000 Black people
I've seen similar happen in London - black people stopped and seeming to be harassed by police for no obvious reason.
But the main anecdote for me is when I was crossing the Swiss-French border near Geneva in a car with my girlfriend.
She is black; I am white.
She was told to get out of the car and required to present various paperwork, then they checked up on the paperwork, holding her for maybe 10-20 minutes, making phone calls.
A man with an impressively large gun stood nearby.
She had a decent job at the UN in Geneva nearby, a perfectly good identity card, and it's not at all unusual for black people to cross that border in a car.
I thought they might check my paperwork too, but they were not interested and didn't ask me for anything, not even to get out of the car. It seems I was free to pass, except of course I waited for my temporarily detained girlfriend.
I've also heard a similar style of tale from Switzerland, from a friend who has lived there for 30 years.
She went to report her son's bicycle being stolen. She is white, but when the police heard her name (it is an Eastern European name), they instantly became less polite, making remarks such as "it's probably one of your country mates that did this, you know?". She got a little bit of comeuppance when she handed them her ID - her Canadian passport - and they suddenly became very polite again.
While the color of your skin makes you a much bigger target for harassment, xenophobia even for people who's skin is white is a pretty similar thought process for those who perpetrate it, and extremely widespread.
I mean, an interesting question that gets underreported is: what is the rate at which searches of black people find evidence, vs white people, per search? Police just want crimes (ironically); if one visually identifiable population group gives them more crimes, they'll preferentially search that one. Hell, it's even worse - if you see a crowd, and you know that, for instance, to pull numbers out of my ass, black people are 10% more likely to be carrying drugs than white people, it's in your rational (if racist) interest as a police officer to always preferentially search black people over white people - just like how if a coin comes up heads 60% of the time, you guess heads every time, not 60%.
The solution is drug law reform and changing the incentives of the police away from maximizing case count.
That doesn't add up though. If you guess that black people are more likely to have guns and you search them far more often, more evidence will turn up, even if they are/were as likely to have a gun than any other group.
If you never search white people for drugs, guess what? You never find drugs on white people.
As a black guy in London, I've not been stopped and searched in over a decade, so I do think that profiling tends to happen more the younger you are (and fit a particular profile).
At the university where I worked, a colleague mentioned that he had been stopped by the campus police four times in his time there (which was longer than my time). He was surprised to learn that I had been stopped thrice over a shorter period, and I am so white I can be seen from great distances. We regularly had to come in at night for patches and upgrades then and it was just a fact of life.
Even in my neighborhood, if I go out walking at night, I get stopped by the police, approximately once every two years. This is with a grey sweatpants, a white T-shirt, and a long white shirt, hardly burglary attire.
I wonder how much of it is a function of being male and, if large, apparently threatening-looking.
I'm 43 and white and have been stopped and searched once - late at night when it was raining and I had my hood up and was walking fast to get back to my friend's place - apparently I was "acting suspicious". I'm pretty sure that if my hood had been down it would never have happened..
Christ, I agree with this article so much it hurts.
I am convinced future people will find this whole saga quite an interesting anecdote of how, for a period of time, _appearing_ to be "anti-racist" was far more important than doing anything positive.
As an aside I find it highly amusing watching the proponents of such changes eat themselves (see Twitch: womxn debacle).
I hate to be "that guy" that does this, but 1984 is a good view on this, albeit an extreme one. For those who aren't aware: in the book the government control the language used by its people, by reducing the number of words in their dictionary.
Instead of "alright, great, amazing", there's "good, plus good, double plus good". Because these people have less language to express themselves with, they are less likely to protest the atrocities that their government is doing.
This new control-as-a-language is called Newspeak[0].
I think language has a key role in how a society develops. I generally agree with the sentiment that moving to using "people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions", to quote another user in this thread[1], is a great idea. It allows us to view people who are blind as just that, a person who happens to be blind. Using the same language for all human people, and then adding "has-a descriptions" (or properties, if you wanted to use a programming term) puts us all on the same playing field, while acknowledging that some people do have differences.
If everyone just treated everyone else with common decency, the world would be a much better place.
Although I agree, I think language does impact perception. I'm not sure if the master/slave, blacklist/whitelist terms play any role, but I'm happy that we generally stopped calling everything gay as an insult. That changed in my short lifetime.
I also noticed that gender neutral nouns and pronouns are more common in writing (for French and German). Again, that's a good thing.
The craziest example I have is the term "useless mouths" in Nazi Germany. Imagine if your group had that label. I'm certainly glad it's not in use anymore.
Well, certainly there is language that is completely inappropriate, imagine what the default branch name _could_ be called if we really were attempting to be non-inclusive.
It's very, very clear what language that applies to, however.
I think fighting against racism and sexism is a good fight, and absolutely worth fighting for.
With that said - those are quite low-hanging fruits, if someone wants to engage in virtue signaling. And many companies do.
I also think that classism is an equally big problem in certain "elite" sectors. The diversity there is good, but most of the people - diverse in race or gender - still hail from the same socio-economic groups.
> those are quite low-hanging fruits, if someone wants to engage in virtue signaling
That's basically what fueled a specific part of tumblr for a long time. People one-upping each other about what is unjust and what everyone should be outraged about. I'm not sure as a whole it had a positive impact on the world.
Background: I'm white, my grandfather who is sadly no longer with us, was captured as a slave in the early 1940s forced to work on the Burma Railway, also known as "Death Railway". Content warning: if you Google Image Burma Railway, you're going to see things other than just the railway.
In all my years of pushing to and pulling from master branches, I have not once made an internal association between that action and slavery. Until now.
Offence is subjective of course and having never made this stretch of a link between a master branch and slavery, it is in no way and has never been personally offensive to me. People are different and I accept that others do take offence to this kind of language. But it is a stretch. It is a word that when taken out of context has other meanings.
If a company such as GitHub are saying that this is wrong and must be changed, my question is why now? Why not 2 years ago or 5 years ago? Is it something that wasn't considered offensive and now is? There is so much outrage about this particular subject which doesn't actually solve any real problems. There are of course real issues that we need to get on top of. Contemporary slavery for example. Slavery is still massively at large in many places of the world including and especially the U.S.A. Just because it's gone underground it does not mean that it doesn't exist. We need to do something about it.
This name change only seems to be creating more separation between us all when the world needs us to come together as one to solve the real problems, of which there are many.
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What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way.
So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
>If the goal is to change minds and open hearts then where appropriate, we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message. Stuff like this is just preaching to the choir and alienating the rest.
> Also not actually changing anything that matters in the lives of black people.
I couldn't have put this better myself. There are two issues
- What people want is justice, including economic justice, and progress. They want to stop being discriminated by gerrymandering politicians and trigger-happy cops. They want an economy that serves everyone and not just those on the very top, and that does not disproportionally discriminate those on the bottom and especially minority communities with a history of disadvantage. In this sense, changing master to main is nothing but a feel-good measure for privileged white people to feel good about themselves without actually having to put in any effort into tackling hard problems like improving democracy or improving the economic system.
- Besides this, it's actually a stupid move in a political, pragmatic sense. Like you're saying, it alienates precisely those you need to bring to your side ("it's pc gone mad!") and it's only going to be well received by those already pre-disposed to agree with you. It's actually my main criticism of the Left nowadays: we are shit at politics! You have to be pragmatic and somewhat calculating to actually get shit done. Many activists on the left today rather childishly think that simply being right is enough, as if you didn't have to be smart, convincing, use rhetoric, etc.
They ended up producing a "manifesto of inclusive software" where they listed every word they considered offensive and what it should be replaced with and made a very public announcement regarding the change.
The only response to their email was my (black) colleague asking if the branch renaming could be postponed to after a release because he didn't know what it could break in the build and release automation in case "master" is hard-coded somewhere.
This apparently started a lengthy thread between him and the 5 PMs where they explained to him that the reason he wasn't supportive of the change was because of the "systemic and cultural racism" he apparently internalized.
As another black SWE - I have to ask which hearts are we trying to open? Some are far too gone and it would be a waste of time to try to convince them to let go of their bigotry. The very same will feign engagement and argue in bad faith while being energy vampires. Why should I supplicate racists before I have my dignity as a human? Fuck "hearts and minds" - I have no way of definitively knowing those - I'll take changed behavior instead, that's all I truly care about. If I ever have kids, I can't have them live like this.
> we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message
I agree, but you need to consciously consider who these people are - if it's everyone, then the battle is already lost.
That said, I do recall getting “pat us on the back” vibes from GitHub but just wanted to throw this alternate justification out into the discussion.
There used to be a Confederate statue in the town square where I live. Many Black people worked over decades to point out what the statue symbolized, how the Klan had revised history in building that statue. Some white people wanted it gone. Finally a lot of white people wanted it gone. Then these same people began calling for reparations. A local college instituted reparations. There are calls to engage with land back movements.
I’ve lived through many backlash cycles. Locally we’re still dealing with egregious health disparities that are costing Black lives daily. There is gentrification. The city’s just lived through a night in which white supremacy took the lives of several Asian women.
But something has changed.
Words matter. We have to keep chipping away at this monster.
It's not just limited to "black" but also American Indians, gay people, trans, etc.
These all strike me as Priviledged people being offended for others and trying to scream "LOOK AT ME I'M FIXING THINGS!!!" with stuff that matters to no one... and in the end, they widen the divide and make everything 100x worse with all the policies to "fix" racism/sexism/all'the'other'isms but making everything about race/sex/etc.
So divisive and counter productive uses of time that solve nothing.
> it trivializes the movement
As a developer, I am comfortable with the change in terminology. As a human... My phenotypes are different from yours and OP's, but I am certain that if we do not bring the critique to bear against systemic enslavement of people (regardless of "targeted" phenotypes), we have all missed the point and really changed nothing. Who is blacker or whiter or truer to the tribe... these are serviceable distractions.
Slavery is abhorrent to any enlightened human. But slavery existed and continues to exist because those who profit like it that way.
Most of this family of points seems to equate 1) being in favor of changing master to main; and 2) being in favor of stopping there.
What do you mean? Name change of a default branch clearly fixes issues of racism in the software industry. Racism in IT = gone
If most things we can do is pointless, fuck it, everything we do is probably pointless.
I'm actively fighting against my own mindset to keep looking for things I can do that will make an effect. Most probably won't. I get it's just virtue signalling or whatever phrase of the week we're calling it but it's also inertia. Yes this one is pointless, but maybe the next step isn't.
Anyone that's ever been told what they're doing is useless will never know.
Shamefully I didn't give any consideration to anyone but myself, keeping my existing mindset everyone on the internet was a white guy like me with all the privileges I have. GitHub changing master to main might have been a joke to you, fair enough, but it opened my eyes.
I dunno I'm probably just whitesplaining, sorry.
Sure, it’s trivial. It doesn’t, in any significant way, actually do anything. But I find a lot of time when reviewing code — if there are code badly formatted or variables misspelled, I have a hard time looking at the actually problems in the code until those superficial things are fixed.
I’m a white person who has performed in a professional production of The Black Nativity. I was literally part of the choir celebrating black traditions in the US.
I now work in software and think less of any racialized group using historic struggles as a tool of power, control, and oppression in the here and now.
Historic wrongs are not an excuse for present wrongs.
Edit: pronouns are hard.
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1) The burden falls disproportionately on Git maintainers and on people with large amounts of dependencies to the old word which is not a good way to distribute work (across tech workers) when making changes especially since some people will not even notice the change.
2) Not everyone uses Git each day and I am certain that people who continue to use the word "master" without knowing a thing about what Git is will be viewed as racist and morally inferior. E.g. (Master of Ceremonies, Master of Arts, etc.). Explain how a tech worker can agree that "master branch" is offensive but putting that they have a "Master of Science" on their CV is fine.
3) Somewhat arbitrarily changing words with a tenuous relation to racism seems like an extremely passive aggressive, murky, and dangerous path to go down. Not only does it lay a trap for people to be accused of being racist but if this is acceptable it is inconsistent with not removing all words associated with slavery. Even words with a distant relation to slavery.
Honestly I find it terrifying that high ranking tech people can't see the cognitive dissonance they're showing.
Either they're lying in a pitiful attempt to fit in with the silicon valley leftist elites or they're actually intellectually inept. Either way it's not good.
Its the master/slave dynamic that is considered the issue...if there were Slaves of Ceremonies and Slaves of Arts as official titles, we might eventually take a second look at the naming too.
While the “master” branch is clearly using master in the sense that it asserts control of the other branches in some way.
So IMO, explaining could be done by pointing at the dictionary.
1, If you believe in Jesus, then you can walk on water. If you can't walk on water, then you don't truly believe in Jesus.
2, Chinese saying, "杀人诛心“，meaning that accusing one's motive is worse than killing that person, as the accused couldn't even defend against the accusation. Attacking the Motive is a logical fallacy, no?
3, Back in the 1960s in China, if you were born in a not-so-red family and denied that you were counter revolutionary, then you were just deeply counter revolutionary, and therefore deserved more severe punishment.
Since when people are not judged by their behavior but their thoughts that someone else assert?
Hopefully an example that’s not too prickly: I’m from the south of the US. I don’t have a southern accent (except when drunk or sleepy!). A lot of people, myself included, have an unconscious bias that people with southern accents are less intelligent than people without. However, I’ve known lots of smart people with southern accents, and lots of unintelligent people without them. I don’t know why I have this bias: it was instilled in me by the culture I grew up in, I guess. But, because I am aware of it, I can watch out for those reflexive feelings that make it more likely for me to dismiss something someone is saying just because of their accent. I can adjust my actions to align with the kind of unbiased person I’d like to be, even though I can’t control the lingering feelings the bias creates.
This is the general idea of wanting people to be aware of their implicit biases: not to judge them due to those biases, but to help them see that, due to societal or cultural or familial influence, they may not be living up to the kind of person they’d like to be. There’s a huge difference between someone who’s consciously racist and someone who has racist priors due to the culture they grew up in. Many in the latter group accidentally propagate racist systems, even though they would never want to do so if they had a conscious choice. But it’s hard for anyone to see how their subconscious affects their day-to-day opinions. The hope of teaching about implicit bias is that people can see its effect in their lives and make adjustments, hopefully reducing the systemic problems that people face in the process.
These tests have been administered to large numbers of people and on average, almost every single person that has taken the test has scored some level of implicit bias. As a result, it's very likely (but not certain) that you ARE unaware of your implicit bias.
Of course, if you take the tests and score perfectly, you'll now be able to demonstrate empirically that you have no measurable implicit bias and will have an answer to those people who insist you do.
The reason why this is different to the walking on water statement, is that there are hundreds of thousands of data points all showing implicit bias is almost universal, whereas there are zero data points showing people can walk on water after believing in Jesus.
The difference from your examples is that an act or attitude can be racist, but that doesn’t make YOU racist. You are not defined by a single event any more than a single belief defines your broader theology.
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I am not familiar with Chinese philosophy and find your perspective very interesting.
"So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech."
In order words, the next time you have the urge to think critically about what you are allowed to type and who is forcing that decision upon you take a deep breath, shallow your skepticism, and reflect upon whether you have been indoctrinated enough into the new political Zeitgeist.
Non of their ancestors were slaves.
We have social issues, mostly because the huge differences in culture and exposure to technological and educational advances. And the fact these people are immigrants. Sure there's racism, and troubles.
But the narrative is completely different from the american narratives. Because of the US hagemony in entertainment and media, you see young jewish black (mostly from ethiopian origin) espousing the American narrative. This is extremely hurtful for their cause as it is not into touch with their reality.
So basically, I hate the american wokeness wars because of the havoc the wreck on non american societies. Not because the blacks in the US are treated fairly, but because the media frenzy is making it impossible to actually get things better.
Not much to add, thought it might be interesting.
Not that we don't have problems with racism – we absolutely do – but the context and reasons are just completely different to the point where the American conversation on the topic for the most part just doesn't apply at all, but unfortunately not everyone seems to have realized this.
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For context, I'm Finnish and many of my ancestors were sold as slaves as well.
Just wanted to point out there's a huge difference here. Black communities in America very much live with the legacy, and remanifestation (I recommend reading The Color of Law), of slavery in their everyday lives. At one point in US history, nearly 10% of american identified as KKK members. Do you think all of them suddenly disappeared.
There's also huge legacies in our academia. Just a couple decades ago sociology was essentially the study of eugenics in our own country while anthropology was the study of eugenics in other countries. Even commonly used terms in statistics (e.g. regression to the mean) root from the study of eugenics. There's been much scholarship dedicated to clearly tracing these roots and a constant theme of antiblackness
PBS has a great history documentary called "American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade" that I'd highly recommend if you wanna start to dig at the heels of how deeply rooted this is in our culture
> - GitHub prefers cheap virtue signaling not only to actually caring about racism, but to technical merit and customer service: the public pays for this PR stunt with millions of adjustments to their repositories and working copies
Neither git nor GitHub is forcing the branch names to change. git added the ability to specify a default branch instead of hardcoding it to 'master'. Github is taking this into consideration by allowing the users to specify their own default branch as well, and updating documentation and command examples to use 'main' as the default branch name.
> - Branch names, and many other similar things, are now a battleground for freedom of expression, exposed to dangerous storms of political correctness
No freedom of expression concerns here. You actually have more freedom now as git, GitHub, GitLab now make it easier to choose your own default/primary branch instead of hardcoding it to initialize to 'master'.
> - GitHub has the arrogance of trying to control how people call their branches, and ultimately people's political ideology through the manipulation of language
GitHub is not controlling anything. You, like always, can name your default branch 'master' if you want.
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My guess is that it ingrains a different habit--patting ourselves on the back for 'defeating racism' via some banal change or other. Or worse, that it leads them to write off the whole movement as disingenuous for all of its focus on pointless endeavors. It's probably another drop in the bucket of things that make people actively unsympathetic and perhaps even drives them toward the open arms of the far-right. Call me cynical, but it seems unlikely that any substantial change is going to manifest from this. Just a little more self-righteousness for some people and a little more bitterness for others.
This is a really interesting framing and I appreciate it.
As a Caucasian American, I have been perplexed by this issue. The terminology change itself didn't especially annoy me - you don't have to change your existing repositories after all - but it didn't seem to really accomplish anything useful. My instinct was that this served no purpose beyond PR ("virtue signaling") and might be mildly harmful at worst (as a distraction from important structural issues, a constant reminder to right-wing people how annoying liberal scolds can be to them) without any upside I could actually envision.
I feel like what you describe was very far from the original intent, whatever it might have been, but I appreciate that it may help in some small way I did not envision.
It is entirely about those "annoying liberal scolds"... and the way anything they say will be turned into an existential crisis. I feel like this is less about any actual change as a constant search for a thing to be aggrieved about, and when found, pounced on with absolutely maximum force.
I think of it as "vice signaling": performing the objections without even a moment's thought, not for the purpose of refuting it but to be seen as being the most, loudest, most obnoxious opposition.
I work on a software team that has the usual level of diversity, an almost equal mix of East Asian, Indian, Middle-Eastern, and White developers, a few women, and not a single black developer. Here's the problem though... I've been part of the screening and interviewing process and we've only had ONE black person apply, he was an immigrant from Africa. He made it all of the way through the interview process, but did not get the job for reasons that I am unaware of, though I did give him a yes vote as he seemed competent and friendly to me.
Given that we have screened and interviewed hundreds of applicants and as far as I'm aware he was the only black developer to apply, how can we as individuals on the team make a difference to try to be more inclusive?
This has been true everywhere that I've worked. In my entire career spanning > 25 yrs I've only had the opportunity to work with one black developer. He was extremely good, but timid, very soft spoken, and too quick to self-judge, leading to him not very proactive at advertising his successes, which was unfortunate as he was doing great work, but not recognized by the majority of the team. When I later became his manager I would go out of my way to ensure that every major accomplishment of his was widely publicized, but by then the perception had already been set.
It seems to me that the root problem is further up than the hiring process -- it feels like it's something that needs to start at a younger age, encouraging more people outside of the usual circle to consider tech as a career in the first place, but maybe I'm not blind to my own short-sightedness and would love to be shown where I personally can effect change.
What is the goal of inclusivity? What is better for your team, having the best developers or having the most diverse developers? What is the productivity and value of diverse developers versus expert developers? Is a developer more valuable because of the skills or because of the skin color? Would you want to be treated by a competent doctor or by a black doctor? I am not saying there are no competent black doctors, but you make it sound that color is more important than competence.
reach out to people with the skillset you like.
black engineers have jobs. the government and defense contractors recruit at schools that have a higher percentage of black software engineers. its not that hard of a concept.
Eliminating words from a vocabulary is very 1984-like. Those words have a deep historical meaning, allowing ourselves to just "remove them" is akin to forgetting and ignoring the dark past of slavery, rather than remembering and acknowledging it (with the hopes it will never happen again).
Saying that it helps change habits (in my opinion) is analogous to saying that preventing kids from playing violent video games will reduce mass shootings (there is evidence it does not). I disagree with your premise that this pushes us to change habits and is only a mechanism to be ashamed of our shared (and dark) history. Lest we forget.
This thread has demonstrated that plenty of people are committed (har har) to calling their repository's je ne sais quoi branch `master`.
While I'm with you that I don't understand how this will move the needle on racial equity, I'm uncomfortable with how visceral of a reaction a group of technology professionals is having to what is essentially a library changing a default value.
Like, vocabulary changes all the time. Technology changes even more frequently. Why y'all so scared to use a different label?
This is an extremely privileged and dangerously ignorant point of view.
There are more people living in slavery across the world right now than ever before in human history.
Maybe we should reflect on that fact instead of simply covering up words which make us uncomfortable in a vain attempt to expiate self imposed guilt for being born with a particular shade of skin.
I don't care if it's a new JS library breaking dependencies to support import instead of require or if it's idiots changing names of things. These people are my enemy.
If I already have zero tolerance for whatever virtue signalling crap is popular in the mostly white and affluent San Francisco, is because of behaviours like this one.
On the bright side, this can help more people to discover there is a world outside of the liberal bubble, hopefully contributing to a more balanced society.
(black ancestors, libertarian background)
I don't mind change if it is for the better, for example postgresql instead of master-slave uses master-standby which is much more accurate how the replication works. Perhaps using main by GitHub is better, but because of timing, it feels like it was made to help forget about that part of the history, which IMO is doing the opposite of what was intended.
I am not concerned about diversity in tech and this was never on my mind until it started getting shoved down everyone's throat by American companies and activists. Many European countries blindingly copy whatever comes out of the USA, so now it's here too.
For me it's just one more annoying thing I feel that some privileged brats that I never met and don't care to meet are forcing others to spend time on.
Is it the better long-term approach? If you give in to a vocal minority what is stopping them from trying to change something else? Git means "an unpleasant or contemptible person". Surely that could be construed as offensive. What happens when / if a vocal minority decides Git and Github need to change their name? Should Github just change their name to prevent backlash?
Not to mention it appears to be mostly white people pushing this change, not even the alleged victims.
Nobody would have complained about GitHub doing nothing had GitHub done nothing.
Now we get to complain about their mindless actions, and possibly later on their spineless back-pedalling.
"Some of them will complain" -- a majority? Then yes, it makes sense to listen and adapt. Or, a loud minority who threatens? I don't believe that the change was made due to any overwhelming user feedback.
You are completely inverting democracy.
If 98% of people vote that something isn't offensive, and 2% vote that it is, and your takeaway from this is "the thing is offensive", then how can anything ever be determined to be not offensive?
This is a useful reminder. It's a reminder that associative thinking can invert causal relationships and turn anything into a symbol for anything else. There is no rational limit to things that can be attacked this way. Someone can demand you to change the way you talk or dress, what you read or watch, how you do your job. The changes themselves can be anything and the only limit to their extent is your willingness to say no.
And by the way, don't ever forget who is enforcing this. This is not your coworker individually asking you do something differently to accommodate them. This is coming top-down from one of largest tech corporation in the world.
Let's not exaggerate, they just changed the default for new repos, everyone is free to continue naming their branches "master" or "stable" or "trunk" or whatever they want.
I've never heard this stated so clearly and succinctly. Thanks for advancing the conversation.
Yeah, I totally need that, because there is not enough churn in tech. For instance, every release of Android since 4 has been identical in terms of UI, so I haven't had to learn any new subconscious habit in the use of a phone.
Web developers haven't had to learn new framework in over a decade; they could use this, too, not to mention C++ devs.
I was caught off guard by the change when it was implemented, and was frankly quite annoyed. My suspicions were the same as the author's, that the reasons were likely insincere. But I never made the leap you did to (try and) assess my subconscious biases. Thank you for the insight!
On an other note, 'main' is fewer letters to capture the same idea ad therefore more efficient.
It's creepily similar to the indoctrination technique of teaching people they are evil and can only be redeemed by following <belief system of choice>.
They changed the goddamned name of the master branch.
You're gonna have to explain to me how changing that name makes much more significant headway than any initative I enumerated above or adjacently related. There's a lot of heavy lifting being done by "a useful reminder".
I mean, you or I don't need reminders, that's what the article is about. As for the rest of the tech industry, its a crapshoot to even suggest even half would be moved by changing the name of the branch nevermind possibly not caring at all about the greater issue for whatever reason.
The FTA is about continuous action that requires investment, you're applauding cheap, low-effort PR moves. This country, and you and I, deserve better than what amounts to yet another TikTok affirmation, and it's difficult to discern tangible value for actual Black people that someone somewhere thought to themselves as they typed 'git checkout main', "Ah, yes, let me reconsider the web of power-relations I'm enmeshed in".
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
There is no amount of reflection that is ever going to substitute the actual presence of Black folk in the tech workforce, and thinking we'll over come this waiting on some kind of ethical consensus that eventually leads to a beneficial outcome is not reflected by history, see Civil Rights legislation.
Suggesting you're surreptisously altering behavior via minor language changes is just "spooky action at a distance" come alive. It lends the sense that someone is "effecting" outcomes without actually having to be accountable for actual outcomes occuring.
The "postmodernists" (in quotes cause it tells you nothing, more accurate would be to call them postmarxist) developed something resembling this (predominantly American) language theory, though much broader in scope, looking at documents from the 19th, 18th, and early 20th century when there was a small elite regulating knowledge, language, and education. (the official language academies of France, Spain, early communities of biologists, crimonologists etc). Those conditions simply aren't the case today precisely owing to mass communication.
All this that is accomplished by this (IMO as a former philosophy academic) complete bastardization of so-called "postmodern" language theory is a new out/game for standing institutions to play. The FTA points out how Microsoft is changing the name of master with their right hand, but supplying facial recognition software to police to identify protesters and mistake Black folk for Gorillas with their left hand.
Changing the name of something or issuing a press release costs absolutely nothing. When you actually dig into the issue you find corporations have no problem with racist practices if changing them would be expensive or challenging. Running background checks on employees and not disclosing what they will discriminate on, acting like meritocracy is anything more than a fiction, the incredible bias towards hiring from places their friends worked at, etc. And most of big tech are falling over themselves to take contracts from oppressive governments and institutions.
I have to laugh a little when Amazon or Microsoft takes a stand against racism but does business in China, possibly one of the most racist, and human rights abusing government on Earth. Turns out the only thing these companies won’t discriminate against is cold hard cash.
Your comment reminded me of those email signatures that say something like, "Please think of the environment before you print this." Do they actually accomplish anything or do they just annoy people?
We need to weigh the real impact of actions against their potential annoyance. Because otherwise we're turning people off to the goals we're trying to achieve.
There was recently an environmental action in my city to stop traffic with a banner during a busy Sunday when lots of people were returning to the city. The activists did it because they wanted to get people to notice and care about the environment. The motorists were of course very annoyed and many of them posted on social media about this. Does annoying a bunch of motorists work towards saving the environment or just alienate people who could have been your allies?
There's a similar dynamic happening here.
A name was changed.
The change annoyed some people. Some people were not annoyed.
Nothing else happened.
On an individual level, I don't find it useful to get too worked up about name changes. Pronouns, names, whatever -- if someone's got a strong feeling I'll use what they want. You know why? (rhetorical HN you, not imbnwa in particular) Talk is cheap. Follow the money, though, the actual money, and supplying crappy facial recognition software that allows mass surveillance and leads to unsupportable arrest of innocent people is $$$. Selling a shitty "AI" program to screen resumes that uses a model that tells you a name like Jared is the best predictor for getting hired is $$$$. Perpetuating inequality through crappy AI/ML design is $$$$, and then noting that it exists and charging to "fix" it is $$$$$! As the beauty and pharma industries know, the best way to make money is to introduce a problem and then introduce a "cure" six months later.
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute there. I have mexican-indigenous blood running through my veins and coloring my skin and all I can say is this: no matter how much you've suffered, you don't get to minimize other people‘s suffering.
Implicit bias is made to be the boogeyman when it reality, it is probably a very a small fraction of the cause of "lack of diversity" in tech, if at all. Anyone who has attended computer science courses in college anytime would know the number of black students were little to none. It has always been a pipeline problem from the education side of things. To say that typing a word that so happens to have a relation to slavery caused a "lack of diversity" in tech is the biggest farce in this industry and it is extremely sad to see this line parroted by many in the industry. I expect to be heavily downvoted and even flagged for "wrongthink" but I think it tells a lot about how irrational and unhealthy our state of discourse is in today's world.
I find statements like these to be well meaning straight from the pulpit of a culture that finds cancellation or edits prefferable to new and better.
It's decline. Regression. It's looking at the present solely through the eyes of the past and a refusal to look an inch forward.
A word won't change the state. It's meta. The nub of the issue is that a black kid who might have an interest in computing has access to one, does he have that as a choice, and can anyone help or nudge him towards an academic pursuit in computing. That's where the work is.
Yes, a habit, but nothing that has to do with race or racism. So, is it a habit worth, or needing of being broken? What was bad about this habit? How does using it in a non-racial context aide in perpetuating racism?
Masters degree. Master recording. Master Chief. Master at Arms. Like Git, none of these things has anything to do with a master/slave paradigm, or even have a "slave" counterpart. There is no slave in git...there is clone and branch. There is no slave in audio recordings, you make a duplicate or copy of the master. Language is complex and nuanced. Not every word used in a race context has to do with the same word being used in another context, unless we make it so. There's nothing consciously or subconsciously racist about saying you have a masters degree, assuming you do. There are many definitions for master[1]. Only one of them deals with the disgusting practice of a person being owned as property, ie slavery, and it's not even the top definition. Should we just get rid of all of the other definitions of the word entirely because one of the definitions has some very disgusting history in the US, and historically the world at large going back thousands of years?
For the record, I'm white. My ancestors were serfs, ie slaves, in Europe. Unless you're of a royal bloodline that wasn't conquered by another royal bloodline, chances are everyone has a connection to relatives that were enslaved by someone, somewhere, at some point in time[2].
Now, I can agree we should get rid of master-slavery terminology. That is blatant, imho. But "master" on its own when there is no "slave" component unless we make one up in our heads? If we follow that logic, there are a LOT of words that we should get rid of, including the word "black" to describe a color. There are a lot of racists who also use that word in a negative context to spread their racism. Where will it end? Where is the line? How much thinner should we make the dictionary so that no one is offended or subconsciously reminded of something that didn't actually have to do with the subject at hand? And after we do that, will there be newly found things that people will get offended at? Count on it.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery
This is the entire point, this sentence right here.
So if that's the point, then it shows that we shouldn't be doing this.
Could you please give me specific examples of what biases I, a software developer, may have? I like to think that I have always treated people with respect, judging them only by the character of their work and interactions with me, as opposed to stereotypes based on characteristics outside of their control. Perhaps I am wrong, but reflecting did not help maybe because I have had found no luck finding a thorough, rational source to educate myself on these issues that doesn't just echo meaningless politically or emotionally loaded statements. I am thus genuinely interested to hear from someone like you who is directly affected by these issues.
Related to this conversation: years ago Nikon removed the terminology of Master and Slave in their flash units in favor of Commander and Remote.
https://petapixel.com/2020/07/08/nikon-says-it-stopped-using...
To the author: We have to start somewhere and it is a sign of progress (no matter how small) that finally there is some awareness around this issue and now something is being done about it
The reason master branches are called master branches is as an analogy to a music/record "master", which means "the original, the truest, the canonical".
(In an analog world where every copy necessitated deterioration, there was a need to say "this is THE version").
So git master branches meant the same thing: canonical. That's why the name "makes sense" even though there are no slave branches.
Just adding this here out of a sense of duty for historical accuracy, and not commenting on the name change itself.
I don't have a horse in this race, I just wanted to point out that the language is far more flexible than some people seem to think.
> My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone who isn't black.
> My next reaction was, "they may be changing the name for the wrong reasons, but the change is brilliant."
This is exactly what I would expect from a person with a deeply ingrained racial identity.
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
Well, I have reflected upon that, and I came to conclusion that it is people who base their identity on 19th century pseudo-science on kool-aid who are wrong, not me.
And by all getting together and renaming our white/blacklists and master branches and slave devices, we're all agreeing that this is important.
And.... yeah, it's also a way to find the people who aren't willing to mildly inconvenience themselves in this pursuit. Yes, cranky posters like the OP are ALSO signaling with their refusal to go along. What they're telling the rest of us is that this racism stuff isn't something they want to care about.
And that's why we do this stuff.
I don't know that I'd call the change "brilliant", though – for anyone not already seeking to actively reflect on their own subconscious biases, this change will probably feel less like a welcome gentle reminder and more like someone trying to control how they think (which nobody likes).
At the time, the master->main switch felt completely pointless.
But I came to appreciate the courage needed to actually commit. It's a signal that people do care.
Issue is, most folk have no idea on how to meaningfully contribute towards a lack of representation.
Which sounds okay(1) if all I'm working on is a simple document. If I'm in the larger context of making a change in code because it's breaking something somewhere else, the cognitive overhead of switching gears from "technical mode" to "political mode" to "what the heck was I really doing again?" is costly.
(1) I had "great" but downgraded it to "okay" because literally no one is offended by this -- it's virtue signaling to make rich people feel like they look better.
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After, I short while i am getting used to main. No issues, just occasionally type main instead of master and vice versa.
Further, i think i like main better. The name fits a bit better the purpose (in my flows) and it also shorter ;)
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Specifically master and slave drives.
Wasn’t a common complaint and was treated with eye rolls. Maybe others had different experiences.
Last few years there has been a dramatic change in fringe groups becoming the masters of speech.
At least for those outside the Bay Area.
The word master doesn't occupy this space in my head and never has. I've associated this term primarily with teachers from a very early age. There's obviously the master-slave terminology in tech, but that really doesn't map to slavery in my head. This is probably because I'm from the British Isles which has a very different history in terms of slavery.
For me, I felt this change was really about the impact this term has for people who have been impacted by slavery having to continue to use these terms, which I thought many must felt comes across as, at best, insensitive.
Hence, I felt the cost of doing this seems reasonable. I mean, if we used the term holocaust for wiping a hard drive at some point people would probably have said - "err, yeah, no that's just a bad idea", because it would be offensive.
A google search on "git master" shows 446,000 results -- now to be revised?
A google search without the quotes shows 171,000,000 results.
This is not to mention all of the company-internal documentation, correspondence, etc. which now becomes subject to pressure/demand for revision.
Yes and so were the ancestors of every race on this planet at some point.
"So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech"
What exactly am I supposed to be reflecting on? I don't need useless word changes that cause issues at my job to do that. This sort of strange thinking that somehow language causes racism and not the other way around needs to stop. It lacks so much logic it's infuriating, especially for people in tech fields. Additionally, you're simplifying words to one specific meaning when in reality the word master gets used in a multitude of different contexts that don't have any relation to black slavery AT ALL.
How about we do something useful with our time instead of constantly looking for victim hood and racism where it doesn't exist? I guess I should be somewhat encouraged because the fact that people have the time to worry about which words might be offensive (or make things offensive that aren't) means they're doing pretty damn well. So well, in fact, that they don't actually have enough going on in their lives and are making problems where they don't exist. The massive con here though is that eventually if you tell enough people they're victims of a system and can't help themselves it'll eventually cause real societal harm.....
Great point! Everyone acts like history started in the 19th century. When you take a step back and learn about history on larger spans, it’s obvious that enslavement was common all over the globe. More people should learn that the world slave originates from the ethnic name “slav”, because Slavic people from central and eastern people were frequently enslaved by Moors, who come from the north of Africa.
“The massive con here though is that eventually if you tell enough people they're victims of a system and can't help themselves it'll eventually cause real societal harm.....”
Agreed, and I’m afraid we’ve already reached that point.
Nothing worth fighting for comes easy. Women's rights, racial rights, gay rights... It all had to be forced to happen, because it's much easier to maintain an unfair status quo than it is to convince millions of people that perhaps their world view is wrong and holding others back.
Now I'm firmly in the camp that this wasn't worth it. Even having this remotely associated with the real important change that BLM is pushing for really dilutes the message. We're talking about a name and not the real injustices that some people face everyday.
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I really don't care about the name change in this case, the OP was mistaken, master record also has roots in a master slave[tape] relationship. So please, change it, just do it upstream and leave me the fuck out of your culture war.
[1] https://youtu.be/5fHvjM_4F6w
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A "master recording" is the immutable "official recording" and is the source from which all copies are made, but the "master" in this term comes from the historical use of a "mastering lathe" to create vinyl records. It's quite clear that a "master branch" in git is not like a master recording, because a master branch isn't immutable and moreover is the branch that changes get merged into.
Given that the "master" in historic VCS programs (like Bitkeeper) is explicitly based on master/slave terminology, that git deliberately picked the term to maintain continuity of context with other VCS systems, and that "master" is ultimately a inaccurate description of what a "master branch" actually is in the context of git, it absolutely should be changed to something less inflammatory, like "main" or "working" or "local."
While some VCS programs may have used master/slave (I think maybe CVS did?), BitKeeper did not.
The (likely) basis for the belief that BitKeeper use master/slave and git followed them, the GNOME mailing list post[0] that reignited this discussion in 2019, was retracted the next year[1].
I wrote a summary of the history[2] for Git Rev News, the git developers newsletter. In short, the usage didn't come from BitKeeper, and was intended to mean 'master copy'.
After the article was published, Aaron Kushner from BitKeeper reached out and gave me some more history on the usage of 'slave repository' in that one particular spot in BitKeeper[3]: it was a presentation for a client that was already using master/slave terminology and so the same terms were used in the presentation.
0: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
1: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2020-June...
2: https://git.github.io/rev_news/2020/07/29/edition-65/
3: https://twitter.com/AndrewArdill/status/1350537333292949505
However, there remains considerable discussion over oppression, race, and politics. For you to shoehorn in your personal viewpoint here immediately ends the discussion and implies that your side is right, when that may not be the case.
Think about if we changed the names literally to “n-word” and “white whip”. You’d be just as disgusted as I am for the opposing side to claim empirical moral high ground and to force you to accept something that you don’t find to be a settled debate.
These changes to remove subconscious bias from our language are necessary. They are microaggressions which the average user doesn't even realize exist- but which do harms to some individuals in our society. This may be a minority group within our society- even a very small fraction of a percent- but removing biases which are perceived as harmful is one way that we as an organization demonstrate that we are being actively inclusive to all, instead of falling back on habits developed to favor, or carrying the embedded biases of, one social or cultural group.
I look at it like ADA requirements for language. If you have a curb a wheelchair user can't climb, that's a harm to that individual- and so we require actions, by law, to ensure that wheelchair users are accommodated in our society. 30 years ago the similar complaints were made against ADA ramps, handicap-accessible restrooms, etc.- that they weren't really necessary because the minority who were being hurt by their absence were such a minority, and weren't really the target served population of the organization, etc. That was anti-inclusivity- and so we passed the ADA and support accessibility for all in our organizations- and nobody these days chafes at it at all, for the most part.
Removing harms from how organizations execute their business operations is part of inclusivity. It's not cargo culting, it's not engaging in a self-pleasuring but pointless behavior, it's not a meaningless act that carries no value- it's ensuring that our organization does as little harm to folks as possible as we move forward doing business in the world.
> Removing harms from how organizations execute their business operations is part of inclusivity. It's not cargo culting, it's not engaging in a self-pleasuring but pointless behavior, it's not a meaningless act that carries no value- it's ensuring that our organization does as little harm to folks as possible as we move forward doing business in the world.
Serious question - What harm are you removing here?
Let me ask again - Who is being harmed, how is this helping them?
Because to me... I see a giant company (MSFT) using political theatre as advertising.
Worse, as a developer in one of the areas that's actually fairly racially diverse (South Atlanta) I sure as fuck don't see any of my black co-workers doing anything other than roll their eyes at this.
This was a change engineered by white people, to appeal to white people's current sense of morality, so that a large company can continue its practices of fucking minority and non-white folks over, and yet here you are congratulating them on wasting billions of dollars on it.
Changes to language like removing the term master are absurd and performative. You have jumped onto a movement that is operating like a religion. Telltale signs are capitalization of certain words that aren't normally capitalized, and making a big deal about certain interchangeable words.
Growing up as an evangelical Christian I was not allowed to say the word lucky and was insisted that I would say blessed instead. The people who were a minority of my church that made a big deal this did so for personal gain in the social hierarchy.
You can sit here and moan all day long about stupid theories that came out of disciplines in universities where the practitioners are universally illiterate in statistics.
At the end of the day the entire theory is rooted around essays and very very shaky implicit bias science where the test which I have taken several times are not reproducible for a single individual. Depending on the day I take an implicit bias test I am either anti-black or anti-white.
Naturally there's no implicit bias test that has other races featured because these all came from US universities who have a myopic view on race driven by politics and title 9.
Enjoy your silly religion. The rest of us are going to set about building a better world for everyone while you ride along on the technical progress and its fruits.
Just so I'm understanding this point of view correctly, every time I or any other dev types git checkout master, a micro-aggression is taking place and someone somewhere is indirectly suffering?
I just can't take that line of thinking seriously, I'm sorry.
Should all uses of the word "master" be changed? Is the main character of the Halo games a microaggression? Metallica's "Master of Puppets"? Is "master bedroom" a microaggression?
Like the author said, it just feels like a meaningless gesture so people can feel better about themselves without fixing any real issues.
https://wptavern.com/proposal-to-rename-the-master-branch-fr...
`main` is just as bad as `master` but for a part of the world which is not domestic US.
Plus... you do know there's this thing called "Masters" degree, right?
Your subconscious bias of being an oppressor is showing. You are pushing your views onto others. This is what some slave owners tried to do. Maybe you should check your privilege and stop engaging in microaggressions before accusing everybody else of doing the same.
It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.
For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.
This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear of getting targetted by a vocal but ultimately small 'woke' crowd (there, another label, but at least a bit more specific than just generally someone who wishes to achieve basic goals like welfare, equality, and regulation of private industry). It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
In debates like this sometimes a small number of loud, well-meaning but naive people get much more influence than they should for fear of the other being painted the bad guy, while a significant number of people who are actually affected by the underlying issues don't get heard at all.
I don't have the experience of any other group doing this. I agree that it is not inherently a political ideology.
The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal. I think it is important to say that because I know people in other parts of the country that see these as insults and would be surprised to know that people commonly self-identify as these terms.
I find that this group thinks their behavior is better and more helpful than apathy, "silence", and the idea of rampant exclusionary hate from the right. When its really not better, its different, but its not more helpful. There is absolutely a constant threat from people afraid of bird watchers in a park, people that blend into their ranks and are willing to weaponize their understanding of race, two seconds after donating to the Democratic Party.
> It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
If you combine both the statements, you are committing a no true Scotsman fallacy.
That's missing polsci 101, left/right exist, that's why they have names, not the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.
Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.
If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it. You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd to not be counted as racists.
It's in everyone's power to start extinguishing the extremes. Until then, I'll take silence on your nearest extreme as your tacit approval of it.
Seeding wrong ideas in what seems to be a neutral context is not nice™.
To switch things around for perspective:
"There's nothing wrong with being white and you should be proud of your race."
Yep, if a black person told me this it would be patronizing, and if a white person told me this I'd assume they're racist. Swap white for black in my quote, and it's what the white community in the US is effectively telling the black community, if not in such obvious terms.
It's precisely because of systematic racism that we white people get to share our "sage advice" on how to combat racism, while being almost totally ignorant on the subject. It's proof of privilege and hideously condescending.
For context, I am neither black nor American, I have little time for woke virtue-signalling and fake outrage, but I do want to be properly respectful of others whose background and sensitivities aren't necessarily like my own. With that in mind, I often find socially acceptable terminology around race confusing.
For example, take the word "color". I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable, nor why one of the most prominent advocacy groups still uses the former term in its name. There is so much unconstructive commentary about this particular example that it's hard to figure out what the relevant history and genuine sensitivities are here. Can you enlighten me?
Black people in America are from many different cultures and are simply people that noticed that they had a shared experience of being excluded from institutions and even entire states.
The terminology simply comes from individuals taking initiative in the moment and saying "they treat everyone that looks like us all the same and we need umbrella terms to acknowledge our shared circumstance so that its easy to refer to ourselves". Other non-black people already had terms for us and these terms were typically also used in the pejorative. Many people consider "black" to be an affliction even today. So what you have is that some black people reject those older terms, some people try to repurpose and "take back" those older terms, some people create new terms, most terms are still in use.
These aren't scientific terms, but they do permeate into academia to convey a shared concept. So there isn't much to read into it except learning what the consensus is, and the history of why it is. But trying to merge it into the lexicon based on pattern recognition with other words will only confuse you.
Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/30/295931070...
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Oh this is a good short summary of the era
Take a minute to reflect back on what happened.
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Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.
I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something "main" or "master".
Economic incentives don't change people's minds, they motivate them to double-down on their biases.
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I like that you quote it there.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
In the US, if you are generally more aligned with the democratic party but see some changes you disagree fundamentally with, you either suck it up or give up your ideals and switch to the complete opposite (republican party).
Just look at COINTELPRO for example, that's what happens.
Although there’s still the CPUSA, PSL and even the DSA.
However the confinement of the current democratic system in the USA today simply doesn’t allow for third parties to gain national traction. There are mathematical models that proves this fact. For the real left to get socialist parties to the national assembly some democratic reforms needs to happen first.
There are. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown a lot over the past few years. They even managed to get four member elected Congress this last election cycle.
It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
I have no evidence, but I suspect McCarthyism and the following hard crackdown on leftists that followed during the cold war greatly slowed down this "natural" growth. It took a generation removed from the cold war for this growth to start up again.
Democratic Socialists, Social Liberals, NeoLibs, and NeoCons(because of the Republican party's shift to the right) are all stuck under one party, so the biggest group controls the entire thing.
Do you think that there's a difference with using "master" for the main branch vs using "blacklist" for stuff you don't want in your system? Or are they equally non-offensive to you?
"allowlist", "blocklist", "denylist", whatever. They all mean something. I know that "blacklist" is used in a number of areas (blacklisted authors etc.), and I don't have much trouble understanding it there, but those uses also come with a whole set of connotations that don't necessarily apply to lists of URLs or whatever. It's a stretch too far for my brain to be able to hop over without thinking it through.
(For the record, I'm also all in for "false alarm" in place of false positive, and "missed bug"/"undetected flaw" for false negative in the context of static analysis where it makes sense.)
it is part of an effort of acknowledging that things white are seen as good or less bad, and things black are seen as bad and worse, and this is consistent across the language
this particular approach of extrapolating that towards skin color and ethnicity is just as misguided
but I could have seen it coming: when I’ve used the words in context before, it becomes clear people have had race on their mind the entire conversation that they try to make a poor joke about the irony of me using those words. Seemingly for their own comfort.
Not exactly what I would call privilege, in America.
You equate the few radicals that see some issue there with all 'on the left' which is presumably 50% of any population.
Similar to veganism: the joke is that vegans are all very vocal about being vegan. But reality is that you simply don't notice all the ones that aren't vocal about it and silently love their lives or focus on other issues. Its just an issue of availability bias [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_burner
2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
> Traditionally, Zwarte Piet is black because he is a Moor from Spain. However, since the late twentieth century the common explanation of Zwarte Piet's blackness has been that it is due to the soot on his body acquired during his many trips down the chimneys of the homes he visits. Those portraying Zwarte Piet usually put on blackface and colourful Renaissance attire in addition to curly wigs and bright red lipstick. In recent years, the character has become the subject of controversy.
As in, it isn’t an inaccurate criticism. It would be nice if the various camps just acknowledged their criticisms based on accuracy.
Yes, a few predictably present radicals does make it an accurate criticism. It would be more difficult to predict this kind of behavior from people identifying as “the right”. They do other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the latter, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the former that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform.
> It's not pervasive corruption that's to blame, it's the evil culture of people not like you and their corrupt representatives!
We have this where I live, but thankfully we also enjoy a fair amount of mobility; it's less common to be entirely surrounded by those who vote the same as you, and most ridings have flipped between two or three parties over the coarse of most constituent's lifetimes. While the ethnic diversity of the ridings has generally increased over the same time.
Americans could use more political diversity; you're choosing between neocons and neoliberals, and fighting visciously against each other to do so.
The best thing a company can do the way I see it is to _dedicate_ a cut of regular profit to a black charity. Like, on a regular basis.
Money can affect serious change in the right “hands”.
JUST MOVE MONEY TO BLACK CHARITIES OR ASSOCIATIONS. ITS CALLED DIVISION OF LABOR. Then, do your best to be inclusive intentionally. That’s the answer IMO.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
I read about the GitHub name change, then completely forgot about it until I saw this HN thread. At the time I think I asked our internal Git guru if this was going to change anything, and he said don't worry about it.
My concern is that a few gaffes from here and there are combined into some unifying characteristic of my "wing," when most people simply take little or no notice of them.
Oftentimes simply being talking in public gains otherwise obscure or even unhelpful views traction simply by being available.
Seems another good reason to “walk away from the left” if even their apparently sincere projects keep backfiring like that.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
The most important word in the term "African Americans", to me, is, "AMERICANS". You're in this with us. You're our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. We're in this TOGETHER. And this woke-ism bullshit is just that: bullshit.
Changing a primary branch name from "master" to "main" isn't solving the damn problem. Execs want to do this to earn PR points and wash their hands of the issue of a lack of representation and equality in the industry as a result. It's cheaper than actually giving a shit. But the reality is that socioeconomic barriers to entry into high paying STEM roles amongst our African AMERICAN friends/colleagues is a very real problem that needs to be addressed on both a cultural and economic level.
Ya'll are every damn bit as capable as the rest of us and I'm fucking tired of seeing you thrown under the bus in this industry, especially under the guise of "woke"-ism. It's time we start tearing down these PR stunts as the falsehoods that they are and insist on real, monetary, quantifiable and results-driven investments in black communities that are damn well deserved.
And to my colleagues in the industry that are non-black (especially white): it's time we stand up and "get their back" for our black friends, colleagues and family members. We're in this together, and it's well past time we stand up for our fellow Americans. This bullshit charade needs to stop and WE have the power to move things forward into an era of REAL representation and fairness, and as such we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do it. Enough talk - it's time to act.
Unfortunately this export from America is starting to take root in Europe.
Are we at the point where we need to announce our skin colour so that can be the basis of judgment of our comments now?
If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.
So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)
I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.
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Oh wait no I don't, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.
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Same thing with plastic recycling, in and of itself it is better than landfill, but as it allows us to feel good and look away from the real problem (plastic is cheap because most impacts are externalized) the recycling of plastic contributes more to the problem than to the solution. I know people who traveled around the world about once a year, own a big house and altogether have a pretty big impact that could easily be reduced, but they do recycle plastic and think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
For the record, I do recycle plastic.
Came here to express similar opinion and your articulation has succinctly and perfectly captured it so I'll just add to it.
Over the years I've come to realise that effecting real change to address the root cause is hard. It almost certainly won't be done by private corporations; the changes need to be enforced by (and at) institutions that are answerable to communities e.g., right to quality education, a humane law enforcer. Not only is change going to be hard but slow as well. However with more and more institutions getting privatised (private jails, contracted police force etc.,) whose sole motive is to earn more profits I don't see how anything is going to improve in the near future. So what ends up happening is every atrocity against oppressed community gets hijacked by these private mega-corps as they sense PR opportunity.
To take another example; Diversity & Inclusion. We do all the song and dance at the workplace to make it more diverse. But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person. The reasons are obvious, the entire education system (and society to an extent) is so rigged against oppressed community that it takes a miracle for one of their community to even make it to resume-writing stage. Instead of addressing the problem at the root cause (make it easier for them to get high quality education, lead a decent life) every corporation makes a big PR-noise around D&I while in reality the work place continues to be non-diverse. Net result is we end up having debates like "why should we reduce interview bar", "it's unfair to the deserving candidates" while completely being blind to the root cause of the problem.
/rant
I agree based on my personal experiences.
One of the concrete suggestions by the author of the blog post really strikes me as a step that we could implement, but we don’t: drawing from non-traditional backgrounds. And it’s because it’s an uphill battle. Much easier to do some low hanging fruit.
I’m not a minority in tech, but coming into my current job I had a semi-traditional background. Even getting first rounds was a struggle, only ameliorated by having a professional network of tech people, which is very much not something that you can expect a non-traditional candidate to have.
Seriously, my “get to phone screen” rate without network referrals was around 2-3%. With referrals was about 60%. That’s how bad it gets. So now when it’s in my direct control I go out of my way to look for non-traditional backgrounds in the pipeline and give them the benefit of the doubt during resume screening, paid for in hours I spend interviewing instead of programming
This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop. I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
> think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
Well, I guess they're more environmentally responsible than if they weren't recycling plastic. It's better to do something, however small, than nothing, surely? (And I doubt their environmental footprint even registers in the grand scheme of things - it's industry we need to shame, not individuals for the moment.)
[1] Who wasn't already heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery, etc., I suppose.
For example, in California, due to long term drought, urban water usage legislation was enacted. Urban water usage in California accounts for less than 10% of the state’s total usage, so a 20% reduction, at significant personal impact to urban residents, has a sub 2% impact on total use. However, it also gives the appearance that the legislature is actively engaged in addressing the problem of water conservation to under-informed voters without compelling those legislators to address agricultural and manufacturing uses (and their organized lobbying efforts).
The problem with “every little bit helps” mentalities is that they enable perverse outcomes when coupled with limited information decision making, finite resources, and multiple concerns to balance. All of this leads to the politically optimal (and thus career sustaining) option set being deeply suboptimal application of resources.
Surprisingly, human minds do seem to work that way. After doing a "good" deed, we're liable to believe that we've done our part, and owe society no further action. Even if our good deed didn't actually change anything.
This effect is often called "moral licensing".
This is exactly what people do. WAY too many people do "feel-good" charity work. They just pick something that's visible, easily partaken and then decide they're "helping" and go about their lives feeling better.
Like donating clothes to Africa, which actually harms the local economy[1][2]. As does dumping tons and tons of food without proper end to end oversight.
Or having a demonstration in a public location, bothering the end-users or workers of a business. Because it's easy and good publicity. They don't attack the people on top who actually make the decisions, because it's hard and boring work.
[1] http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987628,00... [2] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mariah-griffinangus/africa-cha...
A lazy and overused argument. No one said only one thing can be done. Fact is time and attention are resources and by doing some thing you allocate less of them to other things.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/perhaps-we-cannot-do-bo...
No, but it certainly makes you care less. Human attention is not linear.
Our President still lives in a house built by enslaved peoples. Our Congress still legislates in a Capitol built by enslaved peoples.
That fact remains true, and is the prima facie evidence that all Americans have profited from our legacy of slavery, and that we aren't all that concerned with tearing down that legacy and eliminating the harms to folks that those monuments contain... instead a plaque or statue explaining the role of the enslaved peoples is enough.
Meh.
You don't. Nobody does. The plastic you "recycle" gets turned into lower grade plastic and so on until it gets landfilled. For plastic, the only way is down.
Steel, aluminium and glass are examples of materials that are recyclable.
I separate plastic so it can be either burnt together with my other trash, or shipped to Turkey where god knows what environmental crime is committed with it. An extremely small percentage might be melted into some low grade park bench. Absolutely zero plastic will be turned into high quality plastic pellets for industrial as a substitute for new plastic. It does not make me feel good, but not doing it makes me feel worse.
I just voted today for real change. Voting matters, plastic "recycling" doesn't*
* if you live in a place where you have meaningfully different options, not just two flavors of the same
https://text.npr.org/897692090
> Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.
The root cause can't be addressed by the same people who reap the benefits of this system, because it's so deep in its core that it would require substantial change, possibly breaking the system itself.
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It seems you don't have any bash/zsh/fish scripts which assume that the most important branch is named "master"...
Crazy idea: if companies that do virtue signaling on inclusivity were paying their taxes, decent schools could be funded and we would not have so many of those issues.
But instead, those companies are actively lobbying to avoid any taxes, and as a result, poor kids will never have any chance of getting a decent education:
* The IRS Decided to Get Tough Against Microsoft. Microsoft Got Tougher. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-to...
* Facebook, Google and Microsoft 'avoiding $3bn in tax in poorer nations' https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54691572
I am baffled by the naivety of people in our IT industry who swallow the hypocrite "inclusivity" discourse of those big tech giants. They don't care about inclusivity, they only care about money folks.
So schools in rich areas get more money than schools in poor areas.
Charging companies taxes and simultaneously reforming how schools are funded could work?
I imagine changing the funding mechanism would be extremely politically unpopular with homeowners who's property values are attached to the quality of their local schools.
It's such a gross system.
This might have been true once upon a time, but pushes in State and Federal funding over the last couple of decades have mostly filled in the gaps. Take a careful look at district funding per-pupil in your state and you might be surprised. While there certainly are differences, they are nowhere near as large as they were in the past.
> On average, 8% of revenues are federal, 47% from the state, and 45% locally sourced.
And this varies widely from state to state.
More money isn't going to fix it.
We need to break up the teacher's unions and put competition into the education marketplace by supporting students not schools.
If we gave every student a stipend that their parent's could use to pick the school they wanted, then our education system would have competition and actually get better.
The most successful ethnic group in the United States are Nigerian-Americans because in Nigerian society, education is valued above all else. 61% of Nigerian-Americans over 25 hold a Masters degree - a remarkable number!
Many US cities have tried to throw money at this problem with little to no success. I don't claim to know the answer, but we should at least stop pretending we have it already.
Bingo. My wife teaches for an urban school district. They get plenty of money. We see where it all goes, and it isn't into supporting education.
Certain school districts are way underfunded compared to others. Part of that problem is that a lot of school districts are funded through property taxes. Which has a way of reinforcing the cycle of poverty.
Your voucher system would simply exacerbate the problem. You know what happens when you allow people to be selective about their schools? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight In your case, it would just be a move to private schools and if you don't think those people wouldn't be able to vote out all taxes that go to schools now, then you are naive.
And breaking up the teachers' unions? Yeah. That's a race to the bottom. Already schools in those underfunded districts do their best to discourage long-tenured teachers as their pay is directly related to years of service. Make it easier for schools to churn teachers and that's exactly what you'd see. Not a selection for the "best", but for the cheapest.
Education is a service with no direct material benefit. Investing in it does not pay off any particular person or group in any noticeably tangible way. However, having a well-educated population benefits everyone and everything.
Education is one area where we probably need less privatization rather than more.
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In fact, it's perfectly possible to disagree with your company's policy on taxes, and agree with their policy on inclusivity! In fact, these tech workers have almost no control over the taxes their company pays or doesn't pay!
I think many people here would agree with me: I'd be happy if tax laws were changes to make big companies pay more! I would never expect anyone to quit their jobs because they disagreed with how their company filed their tax return. That's just a kind of insane way to think about the world. A worker only has one bargaining chip: they can quit. That's an unreasonable ask.
So the biggest issue I have with this is that the US government is really good a pissing away money on useless stuff. Take a look at the latest round of "stimulus" and the breakdown of where everything is going.
or you could use that money to invade a foreign country and drop more bombs on them.
In practice, big techs don't care about POC, they care about mobs.
"Inclusive" words is just what make mobs happy and it's cheaper to do than being accused of discrimination for real reason: POC representation in big tech.
Changing a default branch name is cheaper than try to fix the real world.
That's the point, and that, unfortunately, the reason why the situation will never change: Because we act only on the exposed representation; movies, text on web site, etc.
To me it’s kinda like calling people with long noses “people of nose size”.
Basically there's a movement to shift from inheritance to entity component, wanting to implement people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions. This enables data oriented optimizations so that society executes more efficiently & can be more easily extended as new requirements are submitted by the mob
https://www.acedisability.org.au/information-for-providers/l...
I'm not English native so that could be the wrong term, not trying to offend anyone. In this context, I mean "discriminated persons/peoples".
IIRC, I saw this on the rules of r/publicfreakout (stating that videos representing "POC" would be moderated). For me "POC" means "Proof Of Concept", so I asked and discover it was about "Person Of Color" and so I use this on English spoken Internet.
But I agree, it's a weird term and I never use this in my native language. Each country have different way to talk about racism and discrimination because each country have it's own racism and discrimination problems.
Lots of languages have a fuzzy formal/casual split where usage is both context-based and a matter of respect, though I think the US is more unique in (1) the degree of energy focused towards coming up with formal names for demographic groups and (2) making them out of words that are also used casually.
The terminology seems to be shifting to BIPOC, to include Indigenous peoples. I haven’t heard an a explanation for why Black is also split out.
I had a similar conversation when a black colleague was late for work, having been stopped and searched by the police in London.
The other 10 (white) developers were all shocked, but he said it as casually as someone might report they'd missed the train, or had a puncture on a bicycle. He was stopped regularly, nothing to be done about it.
No one else had ever been stopped.
(A few months later, one of these white developers and I were walking away from the office when the other guy was stopped by the police. They searched his backpack on suspicion of theft. They told us the description was "white youth, short black hair, red football shirt, riding a blue mountain bike with a black backpack", which exactly matched my colleague.)
The government figures say, from April 2019 to March 2020:
> there were 6 stop and searches for every 1,000 White people, compared with 54 for every 1,000 Black people
and this is an improvement!
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-jus...
But the main anecdote for me is when I was crossing the Swiss-French border near Geneva in a car with my girlfriend.
She is black; I am white.
She was told to get out of the car and required to present various paperwork, then they checked up on the paperwork, holding her for maybe 10-20 minutes, making phone calls.
A man with an impressively large gun stood nearby.
She had a decent job at the UN in Geneva nearby, a perfectly good identity card, and it's not at all unusual for black people to cross that border in a car.
I thought they might check my paperwork too, but they were not interested and didn't ask me for anything, not even to get out of the car. It seems I was free to pass, except of course I waited for my temporarily detained girlfriend.
She went to report her son's bicycle being stolen. She is white, but when the police heard her name (it is an Eastern European name), they instantly became less polite, making remarks such as "it's probably one of your country mates that did this, you know?". She got a little bit of comeuppance when she handed them her ID - her Canadian passport - and they suddenly became very polite again.
While the color of your skin makes you a much bigger target for harassment, xenophobia even for people who's skin is white is a pretty similar thought process for those who perpetrate it, and extremely widespread.
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The solution is drug law reform and changing the incentives of the police away from maximizing case count.
If you never search white people for drugs, guess what? You never find drugs on white people.
It's a self-fulfilling racist prophecy.
https://fullfact.org/crime/stop-and-search-england-and-wales...
That's for London
(I shouldn't have to say this but obviously I'm describing things are they are, not endorsing them).
https://www.met.police.uk/sd/stats-and-data/met/stop-and-sea...
Even in my neighborhood, if I go out walking at night, I get stopped by the police, approximately once every two years. This is with a grey sweatpants, a white T-shirt, and a long white shirt, hardly burglary attire.
I wonder how much of it is a function of being male and, if large, apparently threatening-looking.
I am convinced future people will find this whole saga quite an interesting anecdote of how, for a period of time, _appearing_ to be "anti-racist" was far more important than doing anything positive.
As an aside I find it highly amusing watching the proponents of such changes eat themselves (see Twitch: womxn debacle).
An optical illusion isn't fixed just because you cover it from view with a piece of tape.
Instead of "alright, great, amazing", there's "good, plus good, double plus good". Because these people have less language to express themselves with, they are less likely to protest the atrocities that their government is doing.
This new control-as-a-language is called Newspeak[0].
I think language has a key role in how a society develops. I generally agree with the sentiment that moving to using "people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions", to quote another user in this thread[1], is a great idea. It allows us to view people who are blind as just that, a person who happens to be blind. Using the same language for all human people, and then adding "has-a descriptions" (or properties, if you wanted to use a programming term) puts us all on the same playing field, while acknowledging that some people do have differences.
If everyone just treated everyone else with common decency, the world would be a much better place.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26490318
I also noticed that gender neutral nouns and pronouns are more common in writing (for French and German). Again, that's a good thing.
The craziest example I have is the term "useless mouths" in Nazi Germany. Imagine if your group had that label. I'm certainly glad it's not in use anymore.
It's very, very clear what language that applies to, however.
Should we therefore take no individual actions? I think this doesn't logically follow.
With that said - those are quite low-hanging fruits, if someone wants to engage in virtue signaling. And many companies do.
I also think that classism is an equally big problem in certain "elite" sectors. The diversity there is good, but most of the people - diverse in race or gender - still hail from the same socio-economic groups.
That's basically what fueled a specific part of tumblr for a long time. People one-upping each other about what is unjust and what everyone should be outraged about. I'm not sure as a whole it had a positive impact on the world.
In all my years of pushing to and pulling from master branches, I have not once made an internal association between that action and slavery. Until now.
Offence is subjective of course and having never made this stretch of a link between a master branch and slavery, it is in no way and has never been personally offensive to me. People are different and I accept that others do take offence to this kind of language. But it is a stretch. It is a word that when taken out of context has other meanings.
If a company such as GitHub are saying that this is wrong and must be changed, my question is why now? Why not 2 years ago or 5 years ago? Is it something that wasn't considered offensive and now is? There is so much outrage about this particular subject which doesn't actually solve any real problems. There are of course real issues that we need to get on top of. Contemporary slavery for example. Slavery is still massively at large in many places of the world including and especially the U.S.A. Just because it's gone underground it does not mean that it doesn't exist. We need to do something about it.
This name change only seems to be creating more separation between us all when the world needs us to come together as one to solve the real problems, of which there are many.