As someone who has seen black colleagues happily using master/slave terminology in new code (embedded systems so this was around I2C devices), and the only one or two developers I’ve worked with who tried to push this renaming being white - I have two issues:
First, I think it’s just a dangerous idea that people have to be so coddled and be ‘protected’ from seeing words that aren’t slurs and have either no contextual relationship or only very tenuous relationship to actually sensitive concepts (‘master’ has many meanings divorced from African slavery and git never had slave branches so plenty of other senses of the word apply). I feel like it’s going so far that anybody who needs this probably haven’t yet really achieved the resilience needed to operate in the real world.
And secondly, since none of the black developers I worked with actually cared about it, it feels like it’s not great to do something and think you’ve done your bit for racism prevention when you’ve done nothing that makes any real difference to it!
First, I think it’s just a dangerous idea that people have to be so coddled and be ‘protected’ from seeing words that aren’t slurs and have either no contextual relationship or only very tenuous relationship to actually sensitive concepts (‘master’ has many meanings divorced from African slavery and git never had slave branches so plenty of other senses of the word apply). I feel like it’s going so far that anybody who needs this probably haven’t yet really achieved the resilience needed to operate in the real world.
And secondly, since none of the black developers I worked with actually cared about it, it feels like it’s not great to do something and think you’ve done your bit for racism prevention when you’ve done nothing that makes any real difference to it!