Get Rid of These Racist Terms From Your Tech Vocabulary
The tech industry has a tremendous amount of work to do in the fight for racial justice and equality. But while recruiting black staff and other under-represented minorities on the ground is critical, there are more subtle issues that need to be addressed as well. This includes thinking about and changing race insensitive terminology that is common throughout the industry, and there is a growing movement of companies and indie developers trying to do so.
GitHub recently announced that it would change the term “Master Repository” to “Master Repository” due to the mention in the previous term slavery, and will drop the terms “whitelisting” and “blacklisting” to remove any racial connotations from their use. The changes will affect all projects on the platform.
Github isn’t the only company to leave those words behind. Other organizations that have made similar commitments include:
- Android Open Source Project (AOSP)
- Apple
- Curl (programming language)
- Drupal
- Go (programming language)
- Grammar
- Microsoft
- Openzfs
- OpenSSL
- PHPUnit
- PowerShell
- Python
- UK Government Cyber Security Division
These are just a few of the organizations that have updated or are in the process of updating their terminology using neutral wording without such explicit racial references. Some groups began to change these terms many years ago, but numerous alternatives to terms such as Master or Subordinate made the transition a little more confusing than expected – Primary and Secondary, Primary and Secondary, Master and Minion “, etc.
In this case, a disorganized transition is better than sticking to the status quo, but Github’s support for the change is important as it unilaterally affects all projects using its platform, which should provide some much-needed consistency for the developer community. …
Even if you are a developer who does not use Github, this is a good opportunity to review your own projects and change problematic terms that you can use even if they are considered “industry standard”. This includes separating color from technical terms — for example, the phrase “white hat” to describe a good hacker and “black hat” to describe a bad one. (And don’t even start with camera flashes .)
After that, perhaps we can get rid of problematic memes and marketing phrases like “glorious race of masters on the PC.”