The problem is the us and them mentality exists, is very prevalent but basically invisible to or ignored by those on one side of the divide. Addressing issue already present isn't significantly furthering the divide, it's making people aware of what's already there. All the people saying "look how divided we are now!" fail to realise this has always been the way.
In what context can we use the terms master and slave?
The term slave means to be controlled by another entity in its most basic definition. Just because there are loads of people who are slaves in the world doesn't make that term less accurate for its other uses.
Businesses already tend not to use sensitive words, especially publicly. This is just adding to that list. For example, whilst you can kill a process we don’t use the word murder. Same for lots of other negatively emotional words.
People do get hung up on naming & terminology. But as has been mentioned elsewhere, master/slave is often chosen through convention when other names would be clearer. We have a whitelist application at work that is actually an event routing gateway. If we renamed it it’d be easier to explain.
To me it seems an easy task to not use master/slave and white/black when I’m naming things, not something worth arguing about, especially if there’s a chance it removes some negativity for some people. I’m happy to spend a few minutes helping someone with a chore and I see this as the same low level of effort and impact.
You can frame it as "bowing down" either way. The other option is to "bow down" to those who do no want to change but have no good reasons beyond that it's what they are used to and, typically, negative partisanship (that on principle they object to anything promoted by the other side of the political divide, simply because). People need to find better arguments than emotionally & illogically driven defensiveness.
The other option is to have a nuanced debate from both sides where one side isn't thought of as hateful and evil. One side is saying "hey this is a slippery slope" the other side is saying "no you're wrong and you're what's wrong with the world today".
Also, where has my defensiveness been at all illogical or emotional? The arguments presented against doing this seem pretty sound from the people who can explain their reasons.
But language DOES matter, and it DOES help people. It's a bit more abstract and decoupled, but shit, you're supposed to be a coder (you ARE on a programming forum), so I'm sure you can handle adding 1 and 1 and getting to 2.
Then address what I said: Do you deny the evidence I just posted about there being more slavery today than ever before in history? What is your evidence that "Slavery was long gone and finished when master/slave began being used in computer science"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_contr...
https://www.mediaite.com/sports/breaking-washington-redskins...
>BREAKING: Washington Redskins Expected to Announce Retirement of Team Name on Monday