I don't think it's a good faith claim that everyone using one of the banned symbols is a racist

1. The current flag of Japan is based off of one of the banned symbols

2. Probably the most famous car in pop culture uses one of the banned symbols. Microsoft has gone as far as banning parodies of the General Lee that have none of the controversial symbols[0]

If the flag of imperial Japan was banned due to its association with imperialism and colonialism [1], should the USA flag still be allowed[2]? IMO, the banning of the US flag would be excessive, but is also necessary if the rule is implemented in a fair fashion against all imperialist nations.

[0]: https://forums.forzamotorsport.net/turn10_postst162853_offen...

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Japanese...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military...

The origins of a symbol are mostly pointless, it's the intent of its use. It's a hard argument to say that everyone form Japan is a racist because their flag is based on a banned symbol. The confederacy existed _because of racism_. Its only purpose (and continued purpose) is to identify with a movement founded solely on the basis of hate.

> Its only purpose (and continued purpose) is to identify with a movement founded solely on the basis of hate.

If you care about intent:

I would guess a large cohort of confederate battle flags in race car games are on orange dodge chargers, with the intent of looking like the car on a show centering around the escapades of cousins trying to fight the corrupt county sheriff and county commissioner.

I don't know the intent behind putting it on the car in the show; but the intent of putting it on a car that looks like the car in the show is to identify with the show.

Anybody doing that today is at least a little insensitive and clueless, but that doesn't mean their intent was to actually identify with the confederacy (although, I guess there probably are some people who do intend such affiliation).

This will be one of my argument about changing the current master-slave or blacklist-whitelist terminology in tech.

Is that the same argument?

The country of Japan might not change its flag for whatever reason. That's their choice, and for them to sort out.

Using inclusive language is different because I'm not forcing anyone to type Japan's flag. The origin of Japan's flag doesn't equate "things that are not okay" with skin tone. Your black coworkers today, if they descended from enslaved people brought to the US, have a very high probability of having a white ancestor who was a slave owner—it's part of their identity. Or maybe your coworker was one of the millions of Americans who were forced to work hard labor because of the exception to the thirteenth amendment [0]. It's truly personal. Imagine if "blacklists" were "irishlists": if it was just the origin that was racist, would we be having the same conversation that the origin and the intent can be separated? It's not necessarily hateful to use the "old" term—how could you have been educated on inclusivity when the word is common jargon? But is it racist or hateful to say "I'm actively choosing not to use an equivalent but inclusive term because I prefer the one that I have learned is discouraging or hateful to others"? Yes, probably, in the same way that confederate flag aficionados claim that it represents something different now, or it's the way things "always" have been. In fact, the term probably didn't exist in computing when your parents were kids.

Inclusive language costs nothing [1] and most importantly, it's something that _you can control_. The difference is Microsoft regulating use of the Japanese flag, which they cannot change and which isn't celebrated as a racist symbol, and making the default branch on all new internal git repos "main," which they can easily change, costs ~nothing to do, and avoids terminology which isn't used to be hateful but which is derived from hate.

[0] the old "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted"

[1] I wrote and landed a PR to change "whitelist" to "allowlist" in 20 minutes. Another team codemodded >1k instances of "blacklist" away in a day. Ymmv, but it's easy to simply stop using an old term and start using a new one, replacing the old one over time.

The word "slave" has not become divorced from its original context. I don't think that argument passes the smell test there.

Not sure how you can argue that the purpose of master-slave or blacklist-whitelist terminology is to identify with a movement based on hate. Unlike the confederate flag, it was never a good bet that people using those words are racist.

For something you could use with a consistent approach:

If they willingly undid their imperialism and colonialism, it's fine; the symbol is one of learning to not be racist

If you had to invade and force them to stop it, and the regime ended while clinging to the racist policies, then it's bad

A lot of these are General Lee dukes of hazard recreations. I wouldn't immediately assume that everyone with the livery was a racist, more people collecting historic car livery.

> This assumes that racists are putting confederate flags on their cars in good faith.

I wouldn't call them "racists" if I believed that.

> Also, what kind of discourse is so precious that it should be respected on the ... Forza decal platform?

It's not only games that are doing this.