> It's structural and systemic, so for the first time a lot of of white progressives are discovering that we're part of the problem. Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.

K-12 schools, even in "red" America, very successfully taught me that sex and color aren't how you judge people, and gave me the impression we were past that.

The dissonance of seeing that not everyone was on-board with that program the way I thought they (we) just about all were, and of backlash against that attitude itself(!) has taken me from legitimately, no-BS, about as close to being not-racist and not-sexist as possible, as a kid, to feeling like I'm more racist and sexist than I was. And I don't just mean that my eyes have been opened to ways I was without realizing it, but actually transforming my thinking to consider those factors way more and (inevitably) incorporate biases from them. It's weird and fairly unpleasant (and, as a symptom of precisely this issue, I must hasten to add that I don't intend this as crying about getting the short end of the stick or setting myself up as victim-in-chief, obviously).

We were recently asked by management to stop using the words whitelist and blacklist, as they are seen as being "hurtful". No real idea how to react to that, given that they are terms of art (and of course, were never any sort of reference to race).

I suppose it's pretty much like most management edicts that come down over time. Just nod your head, keep your mouth shut, and with any luck it will all blow over in a month or two.

I’m curious, what words did they ask you to use instead?

I remember in the mid-2000’s we had to stop using master/slave in reference to LDAP and database servers, and (I forget now whether it was IDE or SCSI) the switches on hard drives. The replacement was primary/secondary, which I felt somewhat obfuscated the intended meaning.

There were no suggested alternatives. I almost suggested that we just invert the usage, but clearly this is not a time in which one can make such jokes.

I suppose I'll just start using definitions instead: e.g., "the list of allowed IPs". Good luck googling that...

> I suppose I'll just start using definitions instead: e.g., "the list of allowed IPs".

That's pretty verbose. How about acceptlist and denylist (or blocklist)?

For "master/slave" maybe "boss/worker" would be a good substitute?

In principle, sure. In practice, when a junior wonders why they can't find anything useful when they google or grep for "acceptlist", then what?

> In practice, when a junior wonders why they can't find anything useful when they google or grep for "acceptlist", then what?

Lots of words have synonyms, so that's not a real problem. Sooner or later the search results will catch up, and in the mean time it's always an option for a junior developer to ask a question or figure things out themselves by looking at the implementation.

Not sure what to say to that. For normal corporate use, this would be standard Dilbert-esque silliness. In safety-critical situations, it would be madness.

Maybe (borrowing from audio a bit) a goodpass filter and badpass filter?

EDIT nope I’m confused, but leaving comment for completeness

EDIT2 what about andlist and nandlist?

Ha. Sounds like /r/maliciouscompliance.

producer / consumer

primary / replica

Orchestrator / Executor

None of those really capture the original connotation.

In your mind what's the original connotation?

Even master / minion would be better imo, the I prefer the others already mentioned

A producer makes, a consumer eats. That simply isn't the same as a master/slave relationship. Slaves do not "eat" what masters make. And so on.

But taking a step back, we have decades of lore giving us a sense of what "master/slave", in the technology sense, means. Ditching that for a few seconds of PC glory is madness.

Parent / child

deny list / allow list is being used by some folks in place of whitelist / blacklist.

Blocklist / allowlist or Block / permit

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-knodel-terminology-01

Consider it a chance to use a term with more semantic meaning.

Guarding access? You have an allow list or a deny list. Rolling out an experiment? You have an enable list or disable list. Restricting an input? You have a filter.

> disable list

You are so fired.

I think a lot of this goes too far, but I do agree with whitelist and blacklist. In all aspects of our lives we use "white" to describe things that are good and "black" to describe things that are bad. That movie is "dark." It has a "black-hearted" villain.

While that phenomenon does not have its origin in racism, I do think it reinforces it. I've moved to allow-list and block-list on my company's recommendation. I only remember to do it about 50% of the time, so I'm glad that it's not being policed, but rather a constructive suggestion.

Ok what about your balance sheet being in the black? Should that be neutralized too?

I think it’s going too far. If you want to do something for people go out and help them. Devote time to kids, provide mentorship, etc. This other superficial stuff only satisfies misguided activists and does nothing for affected kids.

Here’s the thing. It’s easy to find someone or something to pillory. It’s time consuming and hard to get on the ground and help. People love “showing” how good they are, but rarely act on it in real life with hard effort —that’s too much work.

As Zizek says, what happens the day after (the revolution)? Everyone is enamored with the effervescence or revolution being the good guys... but no one wants to do the hard work. Everyone’s life has to go on when you get back to reality.

I generally don't like the way these discussions play out because there is plenty of vocabulary we've changed over time when it becomes less palatable to the contemporary taste. It's easy to pull out all of the more innocent examples of the word while ignoring the perspective of those who don't appreciate it.

There are definitely instances of taking it too far, and they tend to be the ones that get disproportionate attention because they generate easy outrage. But in all honesty, if what we're seeing happen right now is progress towards a fairer society, I'd rather not stand in the way of it just because I'm used to having 'master' as my main branch on git, and I'd prefer to have the people most directly affected make their voice heard on this kind of thing.

So no “maître d'” no “maistro”, “meister” either... or is there a line somewhere?

Am I not my dogs master? I mean, of course it should not be used to show relationships between people, but relationships between things or people and animals, I don’t see an issue.

I don't think reductio ad absurdum is an appropriate reaction. Nobody is banning those words wholesale.

Of course no one can ban a word. Words exist independently of any authority... that said, it’s not an absurd proposition to think people will want to control those words for their own reasons. I don’t think my examples are a stretch given that it’s a stretch to tie conceptual data relationships to human relationships and see something untowards in it.

Do we change the name for “Slavic” people too because it harkens back to their history where Slavs were the default slave people in Western Europe and the origin of the word’s English meaning?

If anything, Slavs would have a point as it unfairly defaults them as being slaves etymologically.

I might well be wrong but this kind of authority over the use of language seems to be much more US-specific than I've seen elsewhere, which you could attribute to the overall dominance of US people in the places where these discussions tend to crop up (github, HN, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.).

I don't really know what to make of it except that these discussions about not using 'master', 'cop', etc. seem _heavily_ biased to the US perspective and current affairs in the US. I can understand it taking place due to the sheer cultural upheaval that has (quite frankly) been a long time coming, but my mild frustration about `US === the whole wide world` can take a step aside while we focus on the injustices fellow humans face.

Sorry, I respectfully disagree. I am exposed to a similar phenomenon. I am blind. And blindness is routinely used to indicate all sorts of inabilities. Someone is "blind" to something. The blind leading the blind. The blind men and the elephant. I could go on for days. However, I am OLD enough to understand that I am not going to change the world. And there are also no public demonstrations going on, cheering "disability is cool". I just have to deal with the reality of my situation, as everyone on this fucked up planet has to learn at some point in their life. Policing the language does ntt change people.

Reinforces? ... Like the Amex Black Card is bad, why being in the black financially is bad, why cooking delicious ribs on the grill turns the outer portion black, why black is the preferred color for high end limousines, why Chanel and Dior and Bond use black and white logos, why black is used in fashion to emphasize slimness, etc., etc. ad nauseum.

You can also be Black and Proud. I would not suggest you use white in the same sentiment.

If it were just a constructive suggestion, it would be harmless enough. My guess, though, is that "errors" in usage will be regarded with increasing gravity. Use the wrong wording, and your boss and colleagues will tacitly start marking you as one of "them", division increases, and the cycle continues.

There is nothing new under the sun. We're just inventing new ways to hate each other.

I gotta say, I'm not really enjoying the Racism 2.0 upgrade. Weirdly, "Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men" is not only fine by the Racism 2.0 standards, even objecting to it makes you problematic by the new standards. I don't think you can really paint me as being "confused" as in "you should educate yourself," which is a fairly common refrain on the support forum. In some sense, Racism 2.0 runs counter to the reason I bought Racism 1.0, because previously the idea behind the software was that we try hard to treat everyone the same no matter what, and now in Racism 2.0, that's bad, and who you are has everything to do with what you are allowed to do, say, and even think.

I'm not a political scientist, but it seems like when a group takes control, there is always some hidden social rules that you just need to "know", and helps identify the out-group. What you say/can't say in "polite company". Feels like just another mechanism for control.

I think this framing is itself problematic. The language of "forced upgrades" and "pushed out" updates implies a sense of victimization and to me seems to imply that the goalposts are being moved. If "All Lives Matter" was Racism 1.0, what was happening before 2013, an extended beta? Moreover, this line of discussion reinforces the idea that somehow the comfort White people even matters when we're talking about racist systems of oppression.

The truth is that racism has always been more complicated than "the nice people" vs "the mean people". Blackness and Whiteness were invented by slave traders to justify the subjugation of the people they intended to enslave. The definitions of Whiteness were carved out around those in power, in the colonies especially, to make sure they retained their wealth and power.

The problem we face as White people now is that we are far enough into the advancement of this system that we unwittingly participate in and benefit from it. This makes me extremely angry. What we have is a system that is so advanced that most of us White people do not see it, a system so geared toward our comfort and privilege that when the system is questioned, it makes us feel uncomfortable and impinged.

I'm reminded of the story about Facebook's AI that created a language that humans couldn't understand. The racist system we were born into, have swum in for our whole lives, and are now confronted with is not something that can be refactored, papered over with code coverage, or pivoted in the same way that we often think of resolving software problems. The system itself is corrupt. We need to rm -rf this repo and init a new one with a fresh perspective and a bold, courageous vision for the kind of society that we want to live in based on our values and lessons learned with. As a White person, that can be scary because it means that the world might not continue to cater and defer to us. But we have to be committed to true justice, true equality for all people.

> Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.

I'm not sure it ever was? It's been criticized for a long time that pretending not to see colour is just a way of pretending the problems don't exist. Generally the best approach is to find nonwhite voices on the subject - part of the problem is that even within antiracism activism it's easier for white people to get on TV or get an audience for lectures and books.

And part of the reason that there's all the problems right now is that ""racism 1.0"" never went away.

I think most reasonable people really do understand the idea of treating everyone the same regardless of race. Personally, I consider that to be ideal behavior on the subject of race relations, and any other standard seems ethically inferior by comparison.

I had always assumed that that was MLK's central point in his most famous speech. Maybe I misunderstood what he was saying.

It was never the correct thing to say or think, you're correct. Society has been critical of people insisting on that practice anywhere from 1960 to 2020, and there's an obvious reason why most depictions of it in media for the past fifty years have been rich white people with southern accents uttering it as an excuse to do something absolutely racist as a punchline.

>I'm not sure it ever was?

I'm inclined to agree. Black authors and scholars have been critiquing the 'color-blind' school of thinking since the 60s; notably, James Baldwin did it live on TV. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZQQ7o16yQ

The "closed source" phenomenon is real. For someone who is not black, the risk/reward profile of participating in this conversation is extraordinarily poor. I'm not stepping in the muck, "Your Silence is Complicity" placards notwithstanding.

I've actually found it extraordinarily easy to talk about anti-racism without imposing any risk on my career, health, or future.

I've been able to do it as well, but I don't think it's fair to call it easy. It requires self-control to avoid getting heated and saying something inelegantly, and attentiveness to make sure you avoid pushing any hot buttons. There's no way you can talk as freely and easily about anti-racism as you can about, like, food or sports.

Sure, but others clearly haven't. Not knowing in advance which category you fall into, the smart move is not to play.

> For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.

I don't think that's true, really; "I don't see colour" was always a cop-out to avoid thinking about anything.

No, it could be used to imply the person saying it will treat everyone the same.

> Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.

It's been widely held up as the standard privileged response that helps secure an unjust status quo through erasure for longer than, really, any of the rest of the phrasing in this sentence was current in how one would express the problem of that statement. As an example (comparatively recent in the history of that expression being widely derided as problematic), when Steven Colbert adopted the faux-right-wing personality for the Colbert Report 15 years ago, “I don’t see race” was one of the standard refrains he used, which wouldn't work if it weren't not only problematic but widely and stereotypically so.

So, no, it didn't just suddenly become the wrong thing to say.

I think it's more that "All Lives Matter" has become a slogan to rebuke the rallying cry that Black Lives Matter. If someone expressed the general concept in a way that wasn't trying to downplay BLM (eg "equality under the law"), I don't think that would be called racist.

Also, you're summing up the topic of racism as referring to the progression of criticizing racism. Actual "Racism 1.0" would be more like "it is good and just to subjugate different tribes". Racism 2.0 would be "they're less capable, it's for their own good".

"All lives matter" as a rebuttal or reminder is about as useful as "LOL it's not actually free you forgot about taxes" when someone mentions "free" healthcare. Everyone already knew that. Context is always part of understanding language and in both those cases the context is pretty damn clear—these aren't even ambiguous or difficult ones. It's just being intentionally obtuse for a plainly-bullshit "gotcha".

Are you implying you didn't already know that "black lives matter"? I'm not following that part of the arguement

No, it's that the message of "black lives matter" is intended as a reminder to a society that acts like it has forgotten this or doesn't give it enough consideration. "All lives matter" as a rebuttal to it is a deliberately-obtuse "gotcha". "Well yeah but all lives matter, so there, you should use that slogan instead of making it about race". Everyone got that already. What (apparently) needed to be pointed out was a more specific thing. And most people understand context or they wouldn't be able to communicate, period, and the context of "black lives matter" obviously doesn't mean other lives don't, as anyone who's not trying to play jerkass quibbling games would already recognize. It's a deliberate misunderstanding for the sake of distraction.

Logically if people have forgotten black lives matter then they have forgotten that all lives matter. I think people who get caught up arguing against logic are purposefully being devisive.

In the context of police brutality, white lives don't matter. Who protests when an unarmed white person is killed by police?

Well the point of saying "All Lives Matter" isn't actually to claim that all lives matter, so a "good faith" way would kind of be missing the point. The people who invented it and say it don't mean the lives of poor black kids in the inner cities, families of Salvadoran immigrants apprehended at the border, transgender activists in San Francisco, etc... the phrase "All Lives Matter" is just the 2020 version of... (I'll let Lee Atwater do the rest):

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni\\er, ni\\er, ni\\er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni\\er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni\\er, ni\\er.”

This quote is essentially saying... that the root of fiscal conservatism and small government conservatism is racism. In the 1960s and still today, people support states' rights as an indirect way to hurt black people...?

This quote is terrible and one of the most racist things I've ever read. It tries to interject race into forms of political theory that have nothing to do with race. Just absolutely toxic for society.