[theorique]

It's not clear to me that there's overt racism in any FOSS communities (e.g. racial slurs on email lists, active rejection of visible minorities at conferences). Perhaps I miss that kind of thing because I'm white, but I've certainly never met any overt bigots. Or maybe the bigots save that kind of thing for one-on-one so as to have plausible deniability? (For what it's worth, no one confided in me, as a white man, assuming that I might share their racist attitudes.)

So if not overt, the racism must be passive and environmental. But the relative abundance of Asian (Indo/Pakistani and/or Oriental) members in IT and FOSS software suggest that there's not an obvious or passive "White Power" conspiracy going on there.

Economic issues, education, and free time make some sense as barriers, and these are disproportionately shared among the different races (in the USA at least).

[steveklabnik]

If you type slurs into GitHub code search, you'll get over 10,000 results for many of them. Some of these are bad word filters, of course, but many are not.

[pmorici]

Are any of them open source projects that anyone has ever heard of? I don't see any.

Edit: why did you delete the links to the searches? It looked like literally 99% bad word lists, and a couple of random repos that probably only the comiter cared about. One of them was a dump of metadata from pirated files off The Pirate Bay.

[steveklabnik]

I deleted them because occasionally I've seen accounts get hellbanned for using slurs, even when simply discussing the words. Figured I'd play it safe.

[theorique]

This is definitely a concern. What does it tell us, I wonder?

I'm certainly not saying that there are no individual bigots in the OSS world. With thousands (millions?) of people you'll get all points of view, beneficial and toxic.

A simple 'grep' of GitHub reveals a lot of crap, but are these influential projects? Do these projects have multiple committers who have signed off with pride that "my project contains 'n-----' in the code comments"? Do these projects have lots of users?

It would be interesting to plot the occurrence of racial slurs against the number of participants in a project (controlling for offensive term filters or corpuses of 'real' language). My hunch is that the vast majority of these terms occur in one-time undergraduate projects or forgotten hobbyist repos.

[steveklabnik]

You're moving the goalposts. At first you wanted specific instances, now you want specific instances in major projects.

[theorique]

What I mean is, anybody can create a GitHub project for any reason and post anything they want to their repo.

I don't consider a Freshman anonymously posting some obnoxious text on GitHub to be a part of the "Official Open Source Community (tm)" any more than a two year old finger painting is a professional artist.

If such a person turned up at PyCon or RubyConf and starting dropping n-bombs in public conversations, they would get a very fast education in what is acceptable public discourse in an open source community.

[maxerickson]

theorique is perfectly willing to have a reasonable discussion about it. Chasing after them to take back the 'any' in the first sentence of the first post isn't going to accomplish a lot.

[Irishsteve]

Yoza! Just did a search for some of the popular slurs.

[ceras]

> But the relative abundance of Asian (Indo/Pakistani and/or Oriental) members in IT and FOSS software suggest that there's not an obvious or passive "White Power" conspiracy going on there.

This is a common argument but I think it's kind of irrelevant. It's not untrue, but it doesn't suggest that there is no bias against other groups (women, blacks, hispanics, etc.). I think it's fair to say Americans by and large are extremely comfortable around Asian people and not so comfortable around blacks or Mexicans. Programmers are no different.

[theorique]

So you're saying there is a passive or subtle bias against blacks or Hispanics in the OSS world in a way that is not also applied to Asian members of that community?

[ceras]

I don't know anything about the OSS world. I'm just pointing out why that argument doesn't mean anything to me. Someone claiming no negativity toward Asians as a group tells me little about how they think of other races, especially since I expect much less negativity toward Asians than other ethnicities in the US in general anyway.

I certainly think it's possible that blacks and Asians face distinct challenges and biases in this community; one would have to be very naive or ignorant of minority treatment in the US to not consider that a possibility.