I think the idea is that you test your documentation just like you do your code. I found a couple linters for this:
I don't think this is a good comparison; the controversy of the "blacklist" term is a complex and polarising topic that depends heavily on context; I don't think it makes sense to look for an analogy here. For anyone looking for a summary, I like how wikipedia [1] describes the context and the current state.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(computing)#Controve...
Colors are just colors. They're not emotionally charged. We do that through cultural context and association.
All of them are artifacts of White racism, “Black” has been widely (but not universally, and many prefer other terms) adopted by the people it targets [0], as (perhaps less surprisingly) has “White” [1], the rest mainly have not. That’s pretty much the defining difference—the others are “viewed as offensive” because they are, in fact, broadly offensive to the people to whom the label is applied.
[0] largely, at least in the US, as a label of shared identity grounded in experience of White racism.
[1] among non-racists, its often not so much a strong identity (narrower ethnic identities often take that role) as acknowledgement as insofar as race os a thing, that’s a fine name for theirs.
> Colors are just colors.
The use of colors aa names of races (and the way some are also associated with subracial groups) is pretty arbitrary rather than descriptive, “red” Indians, “brown” latin@s, and “yellow" asian/pacific islanders aren’t particular different in skin color in any way that maps to the color names.
Of course there are, e.g. the ones who wrote the Baidu Baike article on "yellow people": https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%BB%84%E8%89%B2%E4%BA%BA%E7%... But a term that groups them with Japanese, Mongolians and Indonesians doesn't have much relevance for most Chinese people anyway.
Can we get more context on this?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana,_Coconut,_and_Twinkie
If you want a more objective source and can read Chinese, there's a Baidu Baike (think Chinese wiktionary) page for the term (黄种人):
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%BB%84%E8%89%B2%E4%BA%BA%E7%...
(But it's definitely not the most common expression)
This can be trivially implemented in CI for code and docs and have links to this doc. No need to remember it.
The low-hanging fruit is when there is a banned word with a defined replacement. For instance, in this Google style guide, all instances of "auto-scaling" should be replaced with "autoscaling."
But if you want to go much deeper than that, it gets very tricky very quickly.
For instance, how would you programmatically detect and correct text so it conforms to this style guide's Anthropomorphism guidelines? https://developers.google.com/style/anthropomorphism
Computer communication protocols closely resemble other systems (including human and animal communication). Objects are literally modeled after how ecosystems and social structures work.
Personal opinion of a copy-editor of 15 years: the popular understanding of race is so pervaded by racism that it is difficult to use race-based terms without either reinforcing some racist idea or another on the one hand or risk being seen as "too PC" on the other. Social scientists do need race-based concepts, but outside contexts with scholarly norms, they have many foot-gun affordances.
Do they? There are places like France where the whole concept of race doesn't apply to humans. Race terminology is for things like dog breeds. Humans don't really have races in that sense.
This is exemplified by the fact that someone with a black and a white parents is said to be black, because of their skin color. Even if you are for example 1/8th black descent you are said to be of "race" black because of the resulting skin color. It doesn't make any sense as a scientific concept. Other countries have different classification, like South Africa.
We are one species with various ethnicities, usually mixed.
The effects of race-justified practices were so far reaching that they can be said to shape our societies, just as decades after the abolition of Apartheid, most South Africans know exactly how they would have been classified. At this point, for social scientists to abandon race would mean we would live in a society with features that neo-fascists have ready explanations for and no systematic standard of evidence against which their claims could be exposed for the fantasies they really are. You need to have the concept of race before you can see why the reality does not support the claims of the racists.
In fact, I would argue that disagreements and ambiguities as to what makes a person "white" or "black" are astronomically more frequent than difficulties in understanding what is meant by the words "whitelist" or "blacklist".
Neither should be used to refer to people. “White” and “Black”, capitalized as proper nouns and proper adjectives are in English, to refer to particular identity groups and association with those identity groups are, OTOH, a different story.
"Whitelist" and "blacklist" are abstract terms which are useful because they have general and non-specific meanings which can be adapted to many contexts. Artificially prescribed alternatives, introduced only to satisfy the current American cultural Zeitgeist, are not.
It dismays me to see programmers arguing loudly and stubbornly for bad terminology, when a key skill for designing a good API is to choose good names.
Is it? Two years ago if someone told me they think of certain races every time they hear about whitelists or black holes I'd find them a bit silly.
That is 100% an anglo-saxon world problem since most European languages either differentiate between words for skin color and color name, or using the color name to describe skin color isn't considered racist at all.
I would stretch it even to mark it as an US-only problem.
Every couple of years they release a statement that causes a flurry of changes in the documentation of a few projects I've worked on. Always in really curious ways too, exchanging words that are common to French people in our industry with words uncommon to everyone.
I kind of appreciate the quirkiness of the whole thing.
TIL. Fascinating.
> covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.
And here I was hoping that I was being too pessamistic.
It's mostly due to the pronunciation and spelling of the word ending. Although in this case, the Académie Française decided feminine because COVID is an acronym, and the last word of that acronym is disease, and disease is a feminine word (la Maladie) because of how it is spelled.
So, let me introduce you to my ‘waiguoren’ friend here in LA. Right, the local is the foreigner.
And since it is a place and not a race there are plenty of white Africans out there, same as there are plenty of black Europeans out there. Calling people who have never been to Africa "African American" just because they skin is dark is just plain racism. They are dark skinned Americans and has nothing to do with Africa.
If you think it is wrong for white Africans to call themselves Africans then how can white Americans call themselves Americans? Similarly when I talk to dark skinned people in Europe they call themselves Europeans and not Africans. When they talk about their "race" they say they are black or brown, because that is the only thing separating them from the other people.
Dark skinned people from Europe are Europeans for all means and purposes, just as white Africans are Africans for all purposes. The "race" that you mention is a very recent development, and is an American export that is mostly confined to Europe alone (and mostly Western Europe). The Africans I've met and worked with often fumed at the whole colour-based distinction. They would rather be identified by nationality, and then language-based ethnicity (Zulu, Xhosa, Amheri, etc). And no, it's not that "anyone can see that they have dark skin", there are pretty clear racial distinctions based on skintone too (light-brown vs dark brown, which was part of the basis for the Rwandan genocide).
Color identifies are generally bullshit. For example, what the heck is a white person? Are the Irish white? A 19th century WASP wouldn't think so. In fact, most Europeans who lived in their own ethnic communities in the US weren't white until about the mid-20th century. Incidentally, this is when the Great Migration began and these communities began to disintegrate. The WASPs began to feel threatened (though this is hardly unique to WASPs; cf. the Soviets, the Nazis, the CCP, etc), and so they engaged in bit of social engineering, identity theft, and deracinization. You were no longer Irish or German or Polish or Swedish or Lithuanian or whatever. You were now bland old generic "white". But wait a second. What is "white identity" and "white culture"? Do the Whites speak White? Of course not. This is what identity theft and imposed artificial identities are about. You are robbed of your identity and then told what your identity is by a ruling class that controls that identity. So you need to look to the ruling class to "know" who you are because they're no way to know or determine what whiteness is beyond what they make it mean. If you want to know what "whiteness" means, look no further than the organs and estates of power in this country. This is social engineering and control.
> Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race.
Exactly. Frankly, I don't think people associate "whitelist" with whiteness and "blacklist" with blackness. I don't, and people aren't monomaniacally stupid like that and that's not how we work. We can speak of the gorgeous black ebony of a piano or a raven-haired or a doe-eyed/black eyed beauty, or how handsome a shiny black tuxedo looks or how sleek a black Ferrari might look. Black tie formals appreciate the elegance that stark contrasts can have. We can also speak of someone looking pale as a ghost and sickly, whitewashing the truth, and so on. So it is patent nonsense that people think in these term. Maybe those people who believe this is the case are guilty of some kind of truly bizarre obsession where everything is racialized. Poor them. We judge things according to some normative understanding of what something ought or can be, not in abstraction.
(Some may allude to the historical use of dark colors to depict evil and white to depict good. This is, again, a highly selective reading and betrays the same inability to contextualize. The night is dark, darkness means inability to see, obscurity, concealment. Light reveals, makes things known. Is nature therefore racist? Should we accuse the sun, or light itself, of being racist? How parochial. Again, nobody of sound mind thinks this way and it is nothing less than the paranoia of insane academic bubble chamber ideologues.)
Also people with darker skin due to lots of UV exposure are at LOWER risk of vitamin D deficiency than your average pale skinned person.
So it comes down to genetics. Like it or not. Facts of life.
To say there's "no such thing" as race is incredibly, you know, post-factual. Might as well decide there's "no such thing as sex", just half of humanity is inexplicably infertile.
In medicine you don't get everyone's legs preventively amputated because maybe some people have problems with their legs. In the same way we can't just amputate our dictionary and minds of useful concepts and knowledge like the idea of race, just because some people have problematic interpretations of race.
Also, I don't know what point you're trying to make by implying different base conditions. A "black" person who likes to sunbathe in their garden is also at lower risk of vitamin D deficiency than a "white" person who never leaves their basement. So what? And surely you're aware that at higher latitudes "white" people with darker skin are at greater risk than lighter-skinned "white" people? And "black" people with lighter skin are at lower risk than "black" people with darker skin?
Of course it's down to genetics—at no point have I implied otherwise. The variance in baseline melanin is of course genetic! But, like it or not, "a characteristic is genetic" does not mean "races are real". I suggest you catch up on the subject of human population genetics.
There is no such thing as human race in the biological consensus. Rather, it is an arbitrary social construct present mostly in Western and especially American society, which doesn't even have consistent interpretations across regions or populations.
There is. There is however no clear way to create a line saying "here one race ends and the other race begins", there is a continuous spectrum between Europeans and Africans and Asians. So the way USA tries to put you in discrete bins like "White", "Black", "Latino", "Asian" is unscientific, but the concept that humans whose ancestors came from different parts of the world are different enough for them to be considered separate races is not.
Technically there are more races of humans in Africa than outside Africa since it is so diverse, but USA still groups all of them as "black", its just pure nonsense what they are doing.
I mean, that's literally the definition of a race: "a population within a species that is distinct in some way, especially a subspecies".
I'm not sure arguing whether a concept is real or not real makes sense. If a concept can be clearly defined, it's "real".
I think that sounds like a very good solution, but it's opposite of the solution being touted by the current progressive regime.
They seem to think that to combat racial discrimination, to combat thinking in black and white, we first have to make everything black and white. They then assign different treatments/rights to the different segregations, to correct for some historical wrong-doing, to ensure everyone now gets treated, on overall, "equalish".
From my understanding this principle is even being taught in schools, and also applied to other areas in society (gender-equality, LGBTQ)? If so, we do have quite some way to go.
> Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race.
All these terrible things starts with someone making a comment like this, and then someone for whatever reason taking it seriously.
I'm not going to take it for granted that someone is not going to cause a hissy fit over this sometime in the future.
When the problem is separate treatment of different races, then the problem statement has to talk about race.
It's what Yuri Bezmenov refereed to as useful idiots. Divide and conquer has been used by those in power to rule over the constituents for centuries. They realized that the best way to prevent people from looking at the real enemy (establishment) was to keep them infighting and the best way to do that is to divide people into as many oppressor oppressed buckets as possible and let them fight each other. So now we have people not just fighting about rich vs poor, now it's based on race, sex, sexual preference, ethnicity etc. While we keep fighting each other, the corporations and establishment elites keep getting richer and more powerful, meanwhile our lives keep getting more and more miserable. This identity politics is also used by corporations and politicians to prevent and deflect blame. Want your $2000 stimulus? Want a minimum wage? Want wall Street, Robinhood accountability? Want universal health care? Want an end to forever wars? You won't get any of that and if you question it, you are being sexist for attacking the first secretary of the treasury (paid off by Wall Street and $800G by Robinhood hedge fund), first black secretary of defence (Raytheon board seat), first trans health minister (took out her own mother while forcing covid patients into nursing homes). It is evil yet genius identity politics and people are too afraid to speak up.
"Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on election day." - Thomas Sowell
Obligatory mention for relevant Ryan Long comedy skit:
Apologies for derailing the interesting ideas, but my reaction to this was: Who? What? Surely this is the concept due to Lenin.
Wikipedia-depth research says this is probably a myth; that it likely originates from early Cold War journalism.
I also think sometimes about terms like whitelist and blacklist. The problem isn't that they refer to race. The problem is that "white" and "black" refer to race. White and black are basic colors, and assigning meaning to colors is natural and unavoidable. However "white people" aren't "white", and "black people" aren't "black".
So IMHO the focus should be on dropping racial connotations from colors. If we're fine with not calling Asians "yellow" and Native Americans "red", we should be fine with that too.
Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race.