[komali2]

Some are, yes.

As I said in another comment, merely "avoiding offending black developers" isn't reason alone. It's about what actions an individual and a company can take to explicitly work against the normalization of racism, while acknowledging the implicit bias against, and lack of input from, minority people during the creation of these technologies.

If you'd like an interesting example I heard from a POC photography friend - she wondered if default camera settings tended to dramatically underexpose when working with black people subjects, if more black people had been involved in early photographic technology development.

[extra88]

> Some are, yes.

Can you point to people telling their stories of how the common name for default Git branches affected them? All the people I've encountered advocating for changing "master" to something else in Git have been white (when there was any information to attempt categorizing people as PoC / not PoC).

> It's about what actions an individual and a company can take to explicitly work against the normalization of racism

In reference to disposing of "master" in Git, I interpret this as "We must do something; this is something; therefore, we must do it."

Yes, this history of film with regard to different skin tones is interesting. I think even more black people were involved, the most common "or default" film still would have favored lighter skin because there could be no one film that would be good for all complexions. Maybe having multiple stocks to choose from would have been more prevalent.

[komali2]

> Can you point to people telling their stories of how the common name for default Git branches affected them?

Not without doxxing friends in a kind of "Dance for the nice man, Timothy, so I can win an internet argument" way that doesn't taste very good to me. If there's blog posts out there, perhaps? I haven't seen any.

> "We must do something; this is something; therefore, we must do it."

I am with you that we should always be on guard against milquetoast corporate bullshit. I got an email from my Texas senator John Cornyn about how he supports Black Lives Matters, but of course there's nothing in his email and no statements from him condemning racist dogwhistles from his party leader. Hollow words and hollow actions allow people and companies to "cash in" on a movement at cost to the real activists.

That being said, this isn't just github doing this. Most companies in my personal sphere are taking similar steps. My gf's, mine, my old coworkers across the industry, here and in New York... it's a sort of solidarity movement at this point.

[extra88]

Thank you. While public blog posts or social media threads would be better, if you've personally seen or heard black friends or colleagues talking about being bothered by Git branches being called "master," at least that's something.

A statement of support not paired with more concrete action is not much but at minimum a clear statement establishes a standard they can be held to in the future, e.g. "you said you support Black Lives Matter, why aren't voting for Bill 1234?"