The use of "blacklist" is offensive | Hacker News Reader

The use of "blacklist" is offensive

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24 pointsBehemouth25 comments

The colors black and white representing bad/good, darkness/light crosses cultural boundaries and predate racial tensions by centuries. Fear of the night and worshiping the light are universal. The idea that someone is being racist just by using words that refer to this concept is absurd, and so is choosing to not use these words for this reason.

These misguided attempts to control people's speech do not resolve anyones struggles in any meaningful way and if anything only introduces political fatigue for your cause.

Quick, someone make a chess board with squares that are all the same color and use shapes inside them to differentiate, like a circle and a rhombus. And the chess pieces should be all the same color and same height too. In order to differentiate, they all have post-it notes on them, that say their team and role. The players choose their team name, and agree on roles names. Then the game can start. Don't forget to flip a coin to decide who starts.

I don't mean to make fun or provoke, but I think we sometimes go too far when it comes to PC etc.

No it's fine. Just change the rules so black moves first.

You forgot to mention that everyone needs to be a winner at the end, because no one wants to be the loser.

In my thinking, winner/loser is not a separation we need to remove, since it changed per game, and it's determined by the skill of the player in that game and match. I tried to think of something that people can potentially complain about. I hope they don't. I really really hope they don't complain about winner/loser of a game though!

> I don't mean to make fun

Maybe some things should be made fun of. Like pretending you are deeply injured by a word "whitelist". Otherwise we'll find ourselves in a world... well, the one we're finding ourselves in now.

While I am entirely in favor of non-racist terminology and not offending anyone, let alone minorities, I don't quite get how master/slave and "killer app" may offend anyone and haven't heard of anyone feeling offended. If this is a big deal, please tell me and others.

Same goes for "blacklist/whitelist". i'm not sure this ever referred to skin color...

> haven't heard of anyone feeling offended

There are certain people that enjoy the feeling of righteous indignation at finding "offenses" and "calling out" other people on them. This allows them to feel morally superior and as if they contribute something to the society. So instead of writing code or positively contribute in some other ways, they play the Red Guard and police other's speech. I've read several articles of people coming off this dangerous drug and realizing, post-factum, that this was exactly what and exactly why they were doing it, but too many people are still doing it anyway.

> i'm not sure this ever referred to skin color...

It never did. The Red Guards don't care.

On the lists. The terms mean that black is bad and white is good.

If you have a chat with a racist they'll also tell you that black people are bad and white people are good.

I'm no expert but language shapes how we interact and perceive the world.

It's like cultures that have different sets of words to describe different shades of colours. I remember reading how this gives people in general more or less of an ability to differenciate shades.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/hues.aspx

Oh yes, the so called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the beloved myth of the speech police. It makes great science fiction (read Babel-17 by Delany, it's a classic) but unfortunately as a practical idea that states there's scientific proof that if we use words like "blacklist" it makes us prejudiced against dark-skinned people (but banning this word makes it go away) is total bunk. There are some cultural differences in how people prefer to express themselves but this is lightyears away from "language defines thought" that some people seem to believe.

I'm no expert but language shapes how we interact and perceive the world.

The jury is still out on that one, because language relativity is still a hypothesis, not a theory.

I personally don't believe it.

> While I am entirely in favor of non-racist terminology and not offending anyone

And you can't even comment on it without giving this explanation first because people will assume that you're racist if you don't do this first.

This makes me sad since we have so much do to and we can achieve a lot yet we're focusing these so-called problems.

Blacklisting doesn’t come from anything race related, apparently.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting

Oh dear, what's next? Gender neutral electrical connectors?

I think it's the user that makes a connection with racism. I always thought blacklist and whitelist was based on color absorption, black absorbs and therefore doesn't let through anything. White was simply the color opposite to black.

I assumed master/slave was adopted from the idea of a master record. The main thing that came to mind is audio mastering, not people. Am I missing something about the origin?

It's nice to see changes that make things more clear, however I wish political correctness was not a factor.

Are orphan processes and brainfuck next?

Think of the orphans!

When i think master/slave i think SPI master/slave, where the slaves only do as told by the master. In which case the primary/replica relationship would not be suitable, while the master/slave relationship is descriptive of what actually goes on.

If we have one (in my view unoffensive, but that might be a cultural thing) term which adequately describes the relationship - why not use it?

Is this a joke-issue? I honestly can't tell. I would say yes, but there is an actual commit.

Why stop at Redis [1] and React? The Linux kernel [2], Apple's Darwin kernel [3] and I am sure many more have references to master/slave.

[1] https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=master+slave&unsc...

[3] https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/search?q=master+slave&un...

This is what happens when you try to negotiate with these left-wing facists. When you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. The whole "I'm offended" culture is causing this and will never stop until they reach their dream Orwellian society where everything is forbidden, everything is offensive and nothing is ok anymore.

Enjoy!

Sounds fair.

I imagine "Black Magic" probably originated from a term describing African traditions and cultures.

Etymology is sketchy, but most likely that isn't that case. Using light and dark to mean good and evil goes back millennia and is almost certainly unrelated to race. There are records of the term nigromancy (literally black magic) being used to refer to communicating with the dead, summing demons etc. since the middle ages.

The middle ages started after the fall of the western Roman empire.

So there was more exposure to different races that what's conventionally thought by people in the time periods.

Like a across the Mediterranean from Greece and Italy is Africa.

Conquering Northern Africa have been a goal for centuries before that.

Also the middle East has also been a goal to capture.

So for millennia in Europe the idea of conquering the lands of darker skinned people has been a thing.

I'm not disputing any of that. I'm just not necessarily convinced that the mapping of light and dark to good and evil was connected to skin color.

And the 'black magic' traditions of the middle ages almost certainly drew their inspiration from the rituals of the Hellenistic mystery cults and related groups rather than any African tradition or cultures.

All the being said, I'm straying quite far out of my area of expertise here, so I'm certainly open to be proven wrong.

That's because it has nothing to do with skin colour and everything to do with the age old religious concept of light and darkness. However people will find a reason to get upset about anything so at this point it might as well be.

Well, humour is the best defence against tyranny.

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