I don't think of those words in terms of race either, but it's such an easy thing to change. It might be worth considering that a lot of the people who are speaking up have to feel that way about race being a part of everything all the time and they hate it too.

Everyone's trying to get to a level playing field where race isn't an issue. Maybe equality can seem like it's oppression if you're used to not having to worry about that stuff.

It's likely that you have something that has a particular word that some how 'offends' someone.

Given the word 'Master' would asking 'MasterCard' to change its name make it less racist? Can't say Masters degree anymore because someone has dragged race into it and has been 'offended' by it. Perhaps you know some academic who's in a dilemma and can't cite a quote from a paper because the terminology contains the scary 'Master' word in it due to fear of being called a 'racist' if they use it. See where this goes? Where do you draw the line and how far will this be taken?

At some point, someone is going to draw the line somewhere and disagree with renaming for the sake of virtue signalling.

I'm wondering if "Master" isn't the problem — it's "Slave" that's not so good.

And, when changing "Slave" to e.g. "Follower", it makes sense to rename "Master" to "Leader" too.

I'm surprised some people want to rename the Git "master" branches to "main", although the word "slave" is absent in this context. That's similar to your MasterCard example? (Rename to "MainCard".) But I'm not a native speaker or color minority person where I am currently, so what do I know.

At the same time, "main branch" is shorter than "master branch" and simpler to understand for beginners? I think it's a better name.

So it's not worth doing anything because there's a line somewhere ahead? At some point whatever startup you're working on will definitely reach an end in some form, so you should definitely stop working now.

Sorry astronomers, black holes and white dwarfs are cancelled.

A lot of flagged responses to this that are completely reasonable and respectful. I would encourage the moderators to take a look here.

Some people are constantly marginalised in their everyday, who are constantly reminded negatively of their race, and don’t have the luxury of forgetting about race for even a day.

If changing branch names makes them even just a little bit more comfortable I don’t care if they rename master jiggerypokery.

It's the most absurd waste of human energy. Nothing is being solved, it's energy which goes directly into amplifying whatever actual racial tensions there already were.

Nobody who is actually racist goes "oh. I guess I shouldn't be racist anymore because they changed the name of the default Git branch" -- I refuse to pretend this is anything other than complete totalitarian Marxist nonsense.

That's disingenuous and not relevant to the conversation here. Please take the charitable view of what someone's saying when you reply to them.

Race has always been everywhere. You've just been able to ignore it.

Are you white? What if a black person finds those terms offensive?

This is your privilege.

Here's a really great article that helped me notice my own privilege - https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf