[roenxi]

That gets to what might be the real issue here. This is a change of something that has no relevance to the master/slave debate. It seems possible that it is being driven by someone who is (a) not that clever and (b) making ego driven decisions. I think that might be what is annoying people.

The whitelist/blacklist thing is a bit of a no-brainer, that one should change. Master/slave is debatable, because it isn't actually discriminatory. But whatever, one for the debate. Master git branches are back in no-brainer territory as something that didn't need to change.

[leghifla]

"Master/slave is debatable, because it isn't actually discriminatory"

As a white man, I cannot tell if some black people are offended by that, but I hope not. I had never thought about racism when discussing technical matters using this terminology... until a few weeks ago.

What surprises me it that some people think that changing technical terms will change the lives of victims of racism.

This debate made me think again about a quote from some engineers from the erlang/OTP team:

"We were working on the R1 release of OTP when a group of us left the office and took the commuter train into Stockholm. We were talking about the ease of killing children, children dying, and us not having to worry about it, as supervisors would trap exits and restart them ... we failed notice the expression of horror on the faces of the old ladies sitting next to us "

Should we now rename child/parent relationship too, to please old ladies?

[luckylion]

> The whitelist/blacklist thing is a bit of a no-brainer, that one should change.

Why though, it has nothing to do with skin color. Black and white, grey area, there are lots of things involving these colors, but they aren't about skin color, they're about opposites. And there are plenty of other things including color, e.g. black hole, white vest, carte blanche, but they're not about skin color either.

[roenxi]

White & black skin are, practically, inherent qualities that a person can't really do much about. The argument that associating linking the properties to 'good' and 'bad' could make people feel uncomfortable makes sense to me. People (as evidenced by today's headline) do struggle to keep things separate in their head.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "The argument that associating linking the properties to 'good' and 'bad' could make people feel uncomfortable makes sense to me. "

Then advocates of this should also be campaigning to stop using yellow as the color to indicate warnings, since it's insensitive to Asian-Americans.

But we all know they aren't going to.

[roenxi]

Asians aren't yellow though.

[luckylion]

And Africans aren't black, and Caucasians aren't white. Surprisingly, Native Americans aren't red!