[IfOnlyYouKnew]

Wow, this community is terrible. It's good to see that the people who matter are more advanced: Wikipedia is also (finally) doing this, as I noticed today. And so is Github.

It's a renaming of mostly internal identifiers, a somewhat minor change for those implementing it, and a complete non-issue for anyone else. It doesn't matter if you are offended by the terms or not. Your opinion is somewhat irrelevant for once.

The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism.

Additionally, this issue has grown in salience precisely because people opposed it.

Agitating against such changes is just as emotional as the proponents are accused of being, only the justification is far more transparently dishonest considering the relative ease of this change as outlined above.

People will invariably profess to be willing to help overcome the lingering effects of hundreds of years of slavery and continuing racism. But when they get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to happen.

Not because anyone is racist, of course. No, this is about ethics-in-datastructure-identifiers.

[Zenbit_UX]

> The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism.

My companies black systems architect just finished a whitelist feature and delivered it this morning. Should I, as a dutiful white frontend dev, inform him:

a) that this was in fact a racist decision and he may be a racist or rationally motivated.

b) that he's been oppressed by the whiteman for so long that he doesn't even know how racist this is, thus awakening his mind to the countless micro-aggressions around him

c) do nothing, because this is stupid virtue signaling by marketing teams fueled by white guilt ridding the wave of a woke-movement that, at worse, will get them a neutral "whatever" response or some scoffs, and at best, a pat on the shoulder from the woke twitter-verse?

Please let me know of your selection by reply and I will carry out the appropriate action and report back.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

This is the I-have-a-black-friend excuse that tends to elicit slightly shameful laughter from the audience these days. I didn't know people still used it.

In any case: it: your college does not single-handedly represent all Black people. Assuming that he does is the same basic mechanism as pointing at one red-haired criminal to support your theory of higher criminality among redheads.

The disadvantaged group of any discrimination also isn't itself exempt from actively perpetuating that structure. It's almost a cliché, for example, that female leaders sometimes act extremely aggressive, especially with female employees, in an overzealous effort to fit in, or to dispel any notions of nepotism.

[Zenbit_UX]

> This is the I-have-a-black-friend excuse that tends to elicit slightly shameful laughter from the audience these days. I didn't know people still used it.

No, it's actually nothing like that at all but I can see how tempting it was for you to make a false equivalency in order to support the point you wanted to make anyway.

In actuality, it's a very real and current example of how my colleague, the guy who directs all the devs at our organization and happens to be black doesn't give a shit.

> The disadvantaged group of any discrimination also isn't itself exempt from actively perpetuating that structure.

I see, so option b then. A balsy choice to be sure, I have to wonder if you'd have the stones to mansplain to your black supervisor that he or she is perpetuating a racial system. Based on your choice I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're also perpetuating a stereotype, that of the white guilt avenger. Please do correct me and explain why I'm wrong and a bigot though.

[ogre_codes]

> Wow, this community is terrible.

I don't think this is true.

This particular topic seems to trigger a vocal group of people, but in general this community isn't terrible.

> But when they get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to happen.

This is what frustrates me most. In this particular case people don't even have to make an effort, they just need to be tolerant of efforts made by others and still we get the shouting.