[Zababa]

Small data point: I personally haven't heard anything about that in France. At work we use a self-hosted Github. Some repos have "default" as the primary branch, some have "main", some have "master". You can see some repos that are partially or fully financed by the French government here: https://code.gouv.fr/#/repos. When listing by stars, I see that most in the top 20 are using "master", which seems to be the default when they were created. I know that OCaml uses "trunk".

There are also some hits when searching for "esclave" (French for slave) and lots of when searching for "slave" in our internal doc. That's not representative of all of France, just a small data point of myself and a few things around me.

From my perspective, this seems like a "United States phenomenon" way more than a "western phenomenon". I've spent some time in school studying what we call the triangular trade in school (middle and high school), and I remember some English courses where we talked about slavery and civil rights in the US. But slavery itself is rarely a subject, even for people really invested in social justice (at least the ones I know/hear about). In my experience, people talk about racism, but not from the angle of slavery.

Again, fair disclaimer: I'm not representing all of France, Europe or anything. I'm just a French person and this is my perspective on things.