Amidst all the protests around the globe, the tech community is also engaging in some ways. GitHub has announced that they'll replace racially-loaded terms.
This includes dropping terms like "master" and "slave" for alternatives like "main/default/primary" and "secondary;" but also terms like "blacklist" and "whitelist" for "allow list" and "deny/exclude list."
What do you think about this? What other terms do you think should also be changed?
Top comments (56)
I think it's a good gesture. But it feels a bit awkward as a person of color to see such things when I've never felt that way as from the time I knew about computer science and to where I am now. This feeling though is influenced by many things, partly being that I'm from a different place where some terms aren't as heavy hitting in terms of my history and that I cannot speak for other people of color from other locations in the world.
Re-purposing has more impact than renaming, in my opinion. Changing a branch name from 'master' to 'default' carries less weight compared to github just not working with government institutions like Immigration and Customs Enforcement's ICE. Removing "blacklist/whitelist" in favour of something which is probably more harder to remember has less impact than not blocking open source accounts and repositories from locations like Iran.
Historical names do way less harm than the inhumane practices corporations do today. But that's just my opinion
Thanks for pointing out GitHub's contract with the ICE. A link or details may help:
Also, GitHub has far bigger social problems than a word. For instance, they could rethink banning based on ethnicity.
Thank you very much for this. I've edited my comment with the links you provided.
No, thank you for your testimony that you didn't feel offended by the word. I've linked to it in my new post.
It takes us white people a lot to care about things that matter. It is a small thing. It won't have industry-wide change. But, maybe white people will realize how easy it is to change shit when we start to use our voices about it.
We'll pick the wrong battles for sure, because we have never done this stuff before, caring about Black people. I want to believe it's a baby step in the right direction.
That is a brave assumption. Speaking for all white people is kind of a stretch and probably way out of any of our ballpark, don't you think? In my perspective, we are absolutely the loudest of the bunch, when it's about getting offended by something, especially when it's on behalf of someone else.
Doesn't it already?
Again, assumption on behalf of "all us white people". Stop that, please.
Please, do me a favor and read this sentence again. Are you, really, explicitly saying, that whites never cared about black people before? Really? I have no idea where you get that impression from...
I would classify this as fanatical ideological talk, without any argument as for why this is needed, except "We know it is needed". That is no basis for any decision of this calibre.
It's change, not change that matter. It's a mini baby step.
I am saying that whiteness never cared for Blacks, even today 😉 Nothing I'm seeing is proving me wrong :D
I'm okay with being fanatic. I can look at the last 400 years of history and be pretty confident about that statement.
Well, at this point, it is useless to continue any kind of debate anymore.
Nothing can prove you wrong, if you are dead set on being the absolute authority about truth.
I do hope, that in the future, you take the time to take a good, long look at the world and reflect on these statements.
Seriously, I am sorry you feel that way.
Raphael, I agree with your point that Damien should not make a blanket statement about white people.
However, back to the subject of this post and let me ask you something.
Do you think it's a coincidence that everything black in the English language connotes something negative (black magic, blackmail, blacklist) while everything white has a positive connotation (whitelist, whitewash, 'great white shark')?
Or could it be that those in authority in the past made a conscious effort to make it that way?
Those with the authority now should use it so I think it's the right thing to do!
My argument to that would be, I'm not black, I'm brown, or fair in complexion. But notice how we all spiral into these discussions about wording, which makes everyone uncomfortable either way because that's how the world is, regardless. In fact, saying 'master' is racist makes it racist, and saying 'master' is one of the qualifications my dad got, makes it nothing more than a degree. We all seem to agree that the world needs fixing but this fix should not be top 5 of the list, especially with what is going on in the States, the most recent source of all this tension
To be honest, reading these words, mostly they actually spark the opposite effect for me, since I am more biased towards black being "exciting, more appealing to look at", so I am not sure how qualified I am to answer your question.
But I'll humour your very good question and will try to also insert my point, that I do think that personal perspective plays a huge roll, as I will demonstrate with your examples.
Blackmail, very bad, that one I agree, undeniably. Though I don't know if there is "whitemail" of any kind that would be "good" in comparison. (Apparently, yes there is "whitemail", and it's supposed to be good. Never heard of that tbh)
Blacklist, this one, is different to me. I rather blacklist "bad.domain" than whitelist 1000s of domains I think are "good". Blacklisting is much less effort and in my opinion more helpful. Though the movement toward accept/blocklist is perfectly reasonable in that case. That would get a thumbsup emoji from me, if I knew how to type it on a keyboard :D
Whitelist, Whitewash, great white:
Whitelisting, as I mentioned before, I hate it. SO much work. Please let me blacklist instead, I beg you. Whitewashing? Bad shit, especially in movies.
Great whites? Scary as all hell, they are monsters.
Though, and that is where I am wary, I might be heavily biased toward the color black being good, because I find black, as a color, way more appealing than white.
To be honest, I can't say no to that. Etymology is a complex and very interesting topic and most words that are bound to a color, have the basic color somewhere in their history. So I would like to reserve that judgement to the specialists in this case.
Maybe it's just my naivety to hope "humanity is mostly good" when creating words.
I agree to a point. If it's something that actually hurts people, that would undeniably bring a positive change to the world, then by all means. Bring down the hammer of justice and bring it down hard.
But I don't see the positive it is going to bring the world to rename a default branch in a code management tool. Especially not, if there are so many more obvious things with much more impact we could do with this newly sparked drive instead (for example to bring down the hammer on the police, which I know, is a US-Centric problem right now and not a global thing).
I just think it's a huge uproar over a small thing, when this drive could bring so much more change somewhere else.
White people are perfectly aware of how to "change shit": we've had hundreds of years of experience doing just that; and we've used our voices and power to rig everything in our favour. That's precisely the problem.
If you don't want to pick the wrong battles then don't rob Black people of agency as you have done in this comment: they have voices and they want to be heard. White people (myself included) need to step back and listen to Black voices and act meaningfully - or better still remove the barriers that stop them acting for themselves. We should not simply muddle along making empty gestures that have no real consequence.
This clip from Kim Krayton talking about white fragility seems particularly relevant here.
Yes. I am reflecting on the harm I have done so far. There are a lot of things that are wrong with the way I approach this issue and how I used my privilege.
You are right. And I have a lot of work to do to get better. Wish I had understood that earlier.
Well we Europeans have a long and sorry history that gave us that privilege, and our education systems are designed to preserve it; so it's inevitable that we make mistakes.
Let's see if Git can follow up the gesture with something more meaningful...
It's not really easy to change. Changing those defaults will break a ton of test suites, git-related software and confuse developers around the world (and especially newcomers reading tutorials). This change is making development less inclusive due to the confusion it brings to people that are not already in the game. One more intricacy that does not need to exist.
All of that so a bunch of white dudes can feel better about themselves?
Best summary of the situation I've read so far, thanks!
Thank you for posting this. I totally agree on all points. Git are in a position to take far more affirmative action. Let's hope they do so.
Its like when a child falls on floor and hurts itself, we pretend to hit the floor to appease the child.
"Bad floor, you're a very bad floor" 😅 😅
This is the easiest way to do nothing and still pat yourself in the back, if Github is serious about their social responsibilities they should cut their contracts with ICE, cheap stunts like this are a shameless PR move.
I was going to say exactly the same thing
These terms have existed for decades and now suddenly we feel they're racially loaded? I think this is a knee jerk reaction to a problem that doesn't exist.
The whole debate wouldn't be as problematic, if it didn't go the way every outrage debate goes.
"We say it is bad, prove us wrong", and suddenly there is a whole bandwagon without any proof or argument to be made.
This is not how a discussion should work, and most of the time the path of least resistance is just to give in to the demands, to save your face publicly.
I'm not against the change, if it makes people happy, go for it. I'm just against how the discussion and stigmatisation in this whole process works, every damn time.
Very well put! I've linked to your quote in my post.
Considering that tech has moved towards
workerfor a while, I'm not surprised by the change. Like, boss-worker nodes vs. master-slave nodes. Or even child processes. Things that are under or spawned off of a controlling element have been moving away from historically charged phrasing.I'm glad to see them making progress towards a better way of phrasing, but it makes me think less of them that they're doing it now... There's no way they actually care and aren't just doing it for the pat on the back for being progressive during #blacklivesmatter.
Wait until someone thinks "child process" is offensive because of "child labor".
Exactly. GitHub has far worse social problems to fix than the name of a branch (see point 6 in my post).
Thanks for gathering all of point 4 in one spot! I remember each of those individually, but seeing them all in one place is particularly damning.
I don't know about the point here, though (and similarly point 3 at your write-up). Since language and meaning evolve over time, I don't see an issue with renaming child processes if a lot of people associate it with child labor instead. In that case, it doesn't affect me at all if it stays or if it changes, but it could help people if it changes, so net win. This is also why I see Github's timing as the suspicious part -- they're getting positive feedback and recognition for something that they weren't affected by and a lot of people in what they see as affected populations don't see issue with.
They aren't doing it out of empathy when there's rarely a person affected. They're doing it to look good.
"Road to hell is paved with good intentions" is what I think.
What will this change for people of color? Everybody will have to use new term they are not used to. This only creates more unnecessary work for creators.
The fact that it is causing a lot of people a small frustration may also get them to think. I've seen a lot of discussions happening on why these terms are bad. Even if people were to completely leave their branches alone, they may have learned something.
The master branch in Git was just a placeholder name anyway. With repos forking there is no real concept of master. Or, as the Pro Git book often calls it the 'blessed master', which, in hindsight, sounds even worse.
Renaming "master" will be no small frustration.
I'm guessing it won't be as horrible as painted. Plus, you don't have to change. It's entirely optional. It's not that there will be a blocklist of bad branch names built into every git command line...
And there are safer ways to do this than just renaming everything. Adding a little automation to make main mirror master, update the builds over time, add hooks to warn users etc.
It will be far less painful as we adopt ways to more easily resolve these problems.
The small frustrations I was alluding to were the small open source projects and personal Repos that can change easily. I was done in less than 2 hours. But maybe some of my forks may need to spend some time too. And maybe some links from blogs and stackoverflow will break. For me, that's ok.
I just renamed mine in GitHub. Given I have Azure Pipelines linked to my repos for CI and CD, I also had to make a few changes there:
I am just thinking how many pipelines this will break. Am I the only one?
BTW would it mean the next step is that we cannot use these words in our repositories?
Wait until they see how my RaceConditionExceptions class is named.
Yeah, those pipelines were a bit more work. With config as code it's mostly a simple search and replace. And some folks inside GitHub already seem to be looking into a more platform supported option to reduce the fallout.
A note, if I may. Not every pipeline is a DevOps pipeline that can even be defined in code. There are process pipelines and tools that do not allow this.
Let's say you are a corporation with GithubEnterprise and you depend on another 3-rd party git tool. GitHub changes master to main but your 3-rd party provider did not yet update. What now?
As a QA (mainly) I shiver whenever people say "simple" and even more with "search and replace".
It was in my case, but then again, I own almost every step in my process. And I use different branch names in some other cases already.
In complex environments I'd take a more cautious approach, maybe start using automation, like GitHub actions to sync master to main. Roll out hooks to detect dependencies on master etc. That way you can take the slow and cautious approach.
I don't think anyone feels like this is a huge deal, it's a small gesture. I think the biggest thing this gesture relates to is the inherent need for software to evolve alongside new ideas.
A topic that's much more impactful, but related in essence: Software that needs to evolve beyond binary concepts of gender. There is likely a lot of software written today that literally stores m/f as binary inputs. There's also a lot of software that stores peoples' names as fixed unchangeable primary keys instead of a fluid concept (names can change for a variety of reasons, but is often an overlooked need).
If software can't change, what's the point?
I agree 100% with you, and every step is important.
At the same time I can't help but think that this is not some independent OSS maintainer we are talking about, but a corporation that is currently in business with an organization that literally put people in cages like, last week.
I hope they do not feel off the hook.
It's an insignificant1 gesture made into a cheap PR stunt2.
See points 2 and 3 in my post. ↩
See the end of point 4 on the same post. ↩
I'd be interested to know whether this idea came forward from a POC. I don't think this would've been the first thing that came to mind for me if asked what Github could do in response to the #Blacklivesmatter movement. I personally don't feel this will accomplish much for POC but I guess changing it won't harm anything.
Probably not. See point 4 in my post.
Good for them. However, there are things that help the victims, and there are things that don't. This one doesn't, and it's probably done for their own image of themselves, to seem like they're doing something. This response is meek, at best, and egoistic, at worst. That's my opinion.
If they truly wanted to help, they would advocate and lobby for abolishment of private prisons and war on drugs, as well as demilitarization of police.
Exactly. GitHub could spend therr time and PR resources to stop their contract with the ICE, and rethink banning based on ethnicity.
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