My belief is absolutely not. It comes from an ideology that ascribes simple moralistic explanations to things. “This word has man in it so it must mean it excludes women”. “The word ‘master’ reminds people of slavery”, etc.
Good luck speaking out “publicly” about it in the modern corporate environment. You have to not just accept it as true but actively parrot its talking points. Everyone has to be a believer. That’s how the whole thing works.
There are actual race issues genuinely affecting people every day. Making a big deal out of what are essentially non-issues i'd be willing to bet 99% of people never think about or genuinely care about is just going to make the average person roll their eyes and not bother caring.
Which again, is counterproductive. If you want the average person to care about the actual systemic issues, violence and actual racial oppression, forcing them to adjust their language and take time to address issues like the gp's comment is not the way to do it.
Policing every word people say and making them feel guilty for using the wrong ones will not make them care, if anything it's going to make people who are otherwise neutral, who would maybe care, turn hostile.
It pushes people to extremes and leads to places like 8chan or Parler, where people take their language to utter extremes and the opposite extreme where people are finding offense in nearly every little thing.
Both are unreasonable.
I want to think I personally wouldn’t be insecure enough to be concerned by something like that, but I have to agree that some might feel uncomfortable even if the intent behind that term was benign.
Whether getting rid of that term entirely is worth it or not is another question (how far should we go? do we spend human-months rewriting all Git histories to replace this term with an alternative currently in fashion? what if it changes again? etc.), but just stopping using it in new codebases might be relatively low-effort.
I'll give you a concrete example from the world of finance. In options there are two main forms of exercise. You can have options which can be exercised at expiry and options that can be exercised at any point.[1] When the economist Paul Samuelson started to work on Wall street he was told that he would never truly be able to understand options because he was American and therefore the maths would be too complicated for his mind[2]. So when he came up with the first pricing model that could handle warrants that exercise at any point he named the simple case (at expiry) "European" and the complex case "American" as a dig at his detractors. For that reason to this day we have European and American styles of option exercise.[3]
[1]You can also have options that can be exercised on a given set of dates which are sort of a half-way house but that is a more exotic and recent phenomenon. It is called "Bermudan" because Bermuda is in the ocean between Europe and America.
[2]When I worked in finance (2000-2008) some of this bias still existed. Our swaps desk was almost entirely French.
[3] Reference for the story although it is well known and there are many others https://www.macroption.com/american-vs-european-options/#ori...
I do suspect that the fact that the US doesn’t have a recent history of being oppressed might discount it a little (if one is considered a dominant power, one can afford the luxury of taking some mild negging in stride).
On the other hand, in case of e.g. “blacklist” — it meaning a list of people or entities to deny service — color of skin being unalienable phenotypical trait — history of black skin color used as basis for discrimination and oppression (and indeed denial of service) not long ago (or even now) — it could be a little trickier.
I have no personal experience with either case, though, so who am I to judge.
Likewise "hysterical" derives from "hyster" (Uterus) and stems from the idea that the female reproductive system made women mad and incapable.
I feel like one of the things that people miss often in discussing these topics is the asymmetry of power. If you're one of the people who has historically been discriminated against you may well have different feelings from people who has historically doing the discriminating.
We should listen to each other more and if these terms are a barrier then there really is no harm to using other terms. I think using friendly language is the least I can do from the point of view of being courteous to others.
> We should listen to each other more and if these terms are a barrier then there really is no harm to using other terms.
Agreed.
I’m personally torn on this issue. On one hand, the fact that these words rub people wrong is an indicator of a deeper problem—in an ideal world, no one would take a term personally because they’d know it denotes a technical concept and isn’t intended to put anyone down; on the other hand, it’s not really that difficult to stop using some terms in new codebases.
On one hand, we should get input from those directly affected by this; on the other hand, those affected may choose to stay silent despite possible discomfort and treat it as a problem with their insecurities rather than the industry.
I've also met enough people from different places in the world to understand it happens to everybody for different reasons. Hell there's racism in the world I bet a lot of people don't even realize is an issue. An old Iranian coworker and a chinese coworker of mine hated eachother, for absolutely no reason other than racism.
I also live in a place where the prevalent racism isn't the black/white stuff that goes on in america and where generally black and white people get along reasonably well.
You're right, it's about culture and perspective.
And that's what bugs me most about PC culture. It doesn't take into account culture and perspective. It doesn't take into account the fact that prejudice and racism depend heavily on where you are exactly in the world and it doesn't take into account the fact that a good majority of the things PC culture would consider racist isn't.
All I know is, i've had a lot of great conversations that started with me or someone else asking.
'Hey, where are you from?'
I can't think of one time when either me or someone else was offended by this yet...
https://othersociologist.com/2017/07/15/where-are-you-from-r...
> 'Hey, where are you from?'
Once in Hong Kong I asked a taxi driver of Indian descent where he’s from, and felt awkward when he responded “Hong Kong”.
This was a failure of applying the golden rule on my part, as I hate when others ask me that.
I’m personally starting to think that, when strangers get together, crowds where there’s less profiling going on are where more interesting conversations tend to happen—and I really tend to take “where are you from?” as a fundamental profiling question (some don’t use it this way, but too many do).
At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, the individual self-confidence that allows one to easily respond “yeah I might look X but I’m actually Y, yadda yadda” is also a great thing.
But, to tangentially riff on your point, white straight cis males could never be recognized as even being capable of having such feelings, even if they had them. Only systematically oppressed peoples can feel that way, so it is said.
I feel like this about many attempts to make language politically correct, but I really do wonder, was there actually anyone out there sitting there being offended by this usage of those words before someone told them they should be?
Like was there actually someone sitting there, using an app, seen the term blacklist and immediately started thinking it was an insult to them?