GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
When I hear about slavery, I think about the poor people that did not have any freedom, not about black people. There have been african slaves in africa, asian slaves in asia, european slaves in europe and native american slaves in native american civilizations for thousands of years.
American people are projecting their very own and specific segregation problems onto the whole world by banning words universally useful.
Forbidding vocabulary like this only reduces the quality of debates on the long term and does not make anything better. That is how dictatorships works.
If you cannot say the words "slave" and "master", you cannot have a discussion about it, its history and influences on our society and on real people, because otherwise you would be deemed racist. In my country it became racist and implicitly forbidden to say "black people" or "arab people" because otherwise you are instantly deemed to be racist. So now we cannot talk at all about this topic. Politicians certainly won't risk their career by talking about it. So nothing changes, and nothing can actually improve (including the lives or people living today), because we cannot talk about it...
I will continue to use words however I want.
Yes, slavery has been around for a long time in many countries, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve our terminology.
> Forbidding vocabulary like this only reduces the quality of debates on the long term and does not make anything better. That is how dictatorships works.
This vocabulary hasn't been forbidden. The word is still used, it's just not used re Github.
That said, I consider Github's proposed change to be virtue signaling. Was anybody actually upset at this, or are changes being made just because they can be?
Update: Let me know who disagrees with what. I've disagreed with points made on both sides, so maybe that guarantees ire?
If you’re in the market for a replacement that keeps the metaphorical power, though, I might suggest having a “mother” branch. “Mother” functions similarly to “master” in language, forming compounds like “mother ship”, or “mother sauce”, with very similar connotations: being something from which other elements in the set descend/derive; and to which other elements in the set return for some kind of maintenance or synchronization.
The "mastering" process of audio mixing historically starts with the input of "slave" tapes...
In a few years time, not everyone will have a mother, as thats gendering a guardian. To imply someone must have a mother is oppressive to all the fathers, especially people who have both parents as fathers.
But, I may be misspeaking. Whose to say either one of their guardians are a mother, or a father. That would be too binary of me.
/s
It argues that git‘s master branch is most likely directly derived from the master and slave repository concept in bitkeeper.
That analogy doesn't really make sense, because audio mastering is more like cutting a release branch. The way git uses it is more equivalent to "trunk" in SVN.
Yet, we're renaming git master to git main. The profound and widespread impact of this will surely sweep the nation and cure systematic racism. /s
Point being: Everyone is more than willing to say they support change, nobody is willing to do anything difficult, so they put forward crap PR moves like this that are completely non-consequential.
If we rename the branches beyond Github's UI lots of things will break. And will it really affect racist attitudes even marginally? I can't see it myself. In which case, rather than progress, it's a distraction from anything that otherwise could afford real progress.
Is this progress, or the appearance of progress (aka masturbation)?
This is Microsoft, a trillion dollar company that continuously lobbies the government on issues much less important to society than systemic inequality. They've decided the proper corporate action in the wake of new civil unrest over racism is to change a variable name in an esoteric professional tool. A tool used almost exclusively by people smart enough to recognize the lack of active malice in the current name.
The proper response to Microsoft by anyone who cares about racism should be to recognize the insult to their intelligence.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/face-scans-police-microso... https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-ceo-pledges-to-fight-rac... & here's a post from March: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/03/microso...
Weeding out this sort of terminology was already happening before recent events
Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft
To put it another way, for a very long time we celebrated Christopher Columbus as an American hero. How do American Indian peoples feel about the celebration of a genocide of their ancestors?
And beyond the essentialism, you’re arguing for a set of actions and policies that infantilizes and victimizes ethnicities. Not to mention, polarizes everyone involved in the discussion.
Because I talked to them and they told me.
> Why would it be a 1:1 correspondence that simply being a certain ethnicity means you hold a certain opinion?
Where was that claimed? That's a strawman.
> you’re arguing for a set of actions and policies that infantilizes and victimizes ethnicities.
Source? Do you have some studies that show these specific actions and policies infantilizes, just for example, black people in the USA?
Here is a source that shows microagressions cause psychological damage [1].
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161982749...
That's precisely why I'm saying you're generalizing entire races (not just black people either, which is even weirder that you claim all minorities are ravaged by "microaggressions") based on a sample.
No, your question was "how do you know first hand that any of these people care?"
I know that any of these people care, and first hand, because they told me. That's the opposite of your claim that I'm generalizing.
> you claim all minorities are ravaged by "microaggressions"
Another strawman. I never said that. You still have not provided a source that supports your claim about that these specific actions and policies infantilizes at least some people.
I would think "but nobody was ever called 'master' or 'blacklist', that just doesn't work" but look at some of the comments here already. This is looking super polarized. And I'm not talking about the etymologist that brings to light the racial background of a word like blacklist, that's still stating facts even if it legitimizes the claim.
Not sure I should be posting this comment anyhow but if you value your time you might want to just stay away from the discussion. There are no winners that I have found.
Seriously?
blacklist (n.) also black-list, "list of persons who have incurred suspicion, earned punishment, or are for any reason deemed objectionable by the makers and users of the list," 1610s, from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (a sense attested from 1590s, in black book) + list (n.1). Specifically of employers' list of workers considered troublesome (usually for union activity) is from 1884.
Games such as Go, Chaturanga, Chess, Reversi commonly use black vs white pieces and are depicted as such in early illustrations.
I think that there are other reasons for black vs white than race.
I did find the article "The light and dark of language" that touches on this. ( https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2009/12/the-light-and-dar... )
We can also swap the black and white keys on all pianos. So many things to do to fight racism. /s
Also black and white keys used to be reversed in early keyboards, they changed it to make it easier to see the separation between keys.
Like someone else mentioned, without the racist connotations I wouldn't know whether black or white list was the 'good' one.
Language evolves constantly, always has and always will do. I'm not going to get hung up on things being renamed and I honestly do not see why people should be.
I'm still not sure about the 'master' branch change being required, as it's obvious (to me) the context in which master refers to (like a master copy or a key or something). There's no 'slave' branch (master/slave terminology is a problem).
Please. Humans are diurnal animals, and we depend on sight as our main sense. The idea of light good, dark bad is present in infants. It's likely much older than consciousness.
I'm not denying that there's an unfortunate racist element correlated with it all, with the trend over the past few centuries being pale-skinned people exploiting dark-skinned people, but it's certainly not the root cause of these associations.
Remember, black is not a color; it is a shade or absence of color just as white is a maximal amount of color. As you say, these associations developed perhaps tens of millions of years ago far before European people even evolved to be white. Any other associations developed in the relatively infinitesimal time of hundreds of years are peripheral.
Humans, maybe. But programmers?
The reason it may seem ridiculous is that racism is very, very deep in American culture. The country's culture goes back hundreds of years and is still slowly working on being less so.
Here's an example: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/11/310708342...
By basic knowledge of the English language. Terms like "black market", "black death", "black tuesday", etc. etc. By the expressions like "looking at things in black and white". It is a part of language, it has nothing to do with race. These colors are used in the same way in other languages of other countries that don't even have racial slavery history.
What is your example supposed to prove? That there were in fact some racist songs? How does that make the whole American culture "racist"? If there is a song saying something bad about males in general, does that make the whole culture of that whole country anti-male for some reason?
Basic knowledge of the English language also shows us that the word black does have to do with race. It means something for sure to black people.
The word black is both a personal identity around race, and it is often used to mean "evil" or "bad" in the modern workplace. While "white" is used to mean "good" in the workplace: whitelist. And white is also a race. I would hope that just about anyone can see why moving away from using black to mean "evil" in the workplace and moving to using more accurate words like denylist is not just easy, it would also make the workplace feel intentionally more welcoming to our black colleagues.
Because I am, and I did not ask for this. Find me one Slav who requested this.
And yet, you thinking about the word association is all it took to imagine you you're helping someone with that. Because, hypothetically, there might be someone who is offended. For some reason.
Who thought about renaming master? As far as I know, a white person. Somehow, all these fuckups are started by white people in the US on behalf of minorities. I can imagine how it went:
"master branch... hmm, where does this naming convention come from anyway? Maybe master/slave? Hm, slavery is bad. That means the term master here might possibly offend someone. Welp, let's change it then! Oh, and it'd also excuse my job role of Dev Relations. I'm definitively useful!"
Or an academic in very-soft sciences instead of Dev Relations. I just saw some Dev Relations people on Twitter being very srs about this crap.
Meanwhile, all the software is broken. Feeling like it's held together by duct tape. Consuming more and more resources as time goes on, while functionality decreases.
All of this is excused by talking about programmer time. "Programmer time is more valuable".
Yeah, so valuable we'll be wasting time on this crap. And some things will break, maybe. Some will be fixed, some not. Some manual/help resources will be left in their original, horribly racist form. Some will be rewritten.
Oh, and there's the little cost of making politics just a tiny bit more toxic.
Anyway: when I learned the term for my ethnicity is basically the same word as slave, I thought "Hmm, that's interesting/cool fact" I'm pretty sure all the people react this way if at all.
I don't believe Blacks in the US are as unreasonable as you all paint them. I think you're all pretty damn racist for implying otherwise.
Black and white thinking is often talking in terms of extremes, which neither being inherently 'better' than the other.
It's not for me to say whether the whole of American culture is racist, but I do think the language we use has a lot of power to help people feel less marginalised and having to use some different words is a small price to pay for me.
By reading the documentation? I'm not a native speaker of English, nor am I from the US, and this is the first time for me to learn that some people see a racist undertone in these words. I just learned them from docs.
And these of course are not based on the idea of “race” (which I think is a more recent idea).
But I was talking about the use of the word “black” as a negative thing, such as in “blacklist”.
Etymologyonline.com says “Meaning "fierce, terrible, wicked" is from late 14c. Figurative senses often come from the notion of "without light," moral or spiritual.”
I think this refutes the idea that the metaphorical associations of the word “black” come from associations with race.
You say “nothing to do with”. This phrasing seems open to interpretation. Some might say that everything has “something to do with” everything else. Supposing that you agree that the etymology of the word “black” “has nothing to do with” the idea of being a bad cook, then sure.
It would be far more accurate to say this refutes the idea that the original metaphorical associations of the word “black” come from associations with race. US history is full of stories where that original meaning was extended to black people themselves.
The metaphorical associations have been useful for over 200 years to a society that maintains systemic racism against black people.
To talk about what something "comes from" is to talk about its origins, what it originated from.
A blacklist is a list of things that should be blocked. A whitelist is a list of things that should be allowed.
I never looked at the etymology, but this is how I always thought of it.
Rosstex posted a good explain below.
I can't tattoo a swastika on my arm, despite its origins.
You can use any noun as a verb. Google it.
/gd&r
But where would "greylist" fit in here? It slotted in nicely between whitelist and blacklist, and I'm not sure what a good name would be in the context of "allow list" and "deny/block list"?
Target once sold a children's desk that was available in white or black. One day, that changed to being available in white or African-American.
Target was made fun of for a few days on the internet over that, and presumably some employee learned that when a word has multiple meanings and you are only trying to replace one of those meanings, s/word/replacement/g is not the right approach.
I'd expect that employee also got kidded about it for years afterwards, like if he's going to play a game of chess with a co-worker on their lunch break getting asked if he wants to play white or African-American, or if he shows up at a Halloween costume party as a pirate getting asked if he's African-American Beard.
The term "blacklist" started more frequently occurring at the time of mass enslavement and forced deportation of Africans to work in European-held colonies in the Americas. So even the historical context does not support that the term is completely lacking of racist motives. If you are going to dehumanize and enslave an entire continent, it would certainly help your cause if their skin color continues to be associated with "evil".
Consider also that the Latin word "niger" had many of the same figurative senses ("gloomy; unlucky; bad, wicked, malicious") as black is often used to mean.
We don't need to rename the color black. What we do need to do is to stop using it to mean "bad" or "evil" and using white to mean "good" when there are actually far better and clearer words. Denylist says exactly what it does. Blacklist far less so, unless we are happy with continuing to use the word "black" to mean "evil". I leave it up to the reader to decide how it might psychologically affect someone if their skin color also means evil, and they are reminded of this on a regular basis by words used at work.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161982749...
I'm not saying it's the right or wrong thing to do.
"blacklist" first started becoming popular during widespread slavery of Africans for European colonies. If you want to dehumanize and enslave an entire continent, it sure does help to have the word "black" mean "evil".
If you are a black American, the word black does mean a lot to you for sure. What's the impact of seeing that word mean "bad" or "evil" or "not allowed" on a regular basis at the workplace? Does that experience have anything to do with race? Whether or not it was about race in the past, it is about race now. "denylist" is both more accurate and fixes a problem that we have right now.
I don't live in America, I don't care about the context there, I don't care to have newspeak forced on me without real evidence it causes harm to people of colour, when all I actually see is white people being offended on behalf of others.
Here is evidence that microagressions cause psychological harm: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161982749.... It's easy to find more where that came from.
> when all I actually see is white people being offended on behalf of others.
Also easy to find black people who are offended by these terms. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/
It isn't a massive leap. Kermit A. Crawford, Ph.D talks about these specific terms and that they are microagressions in this presentation: https://www.appic.org/Portals/0/2018%20Conference/APPIC%2020....
You can find sources going all the way back to the 1970s talking about these terms and how they relate to racism. It's only a massive leap if you have not done the homework and if you have not talked to black colleagues in our industry about what they consider to be microagressions.
> Not to mention the science of microaggressions is not even remotely settled.
You are moving the goal posts. You said you don't care to "have newspeak forced on me without real evidence". Then when presented with scholarly studies and real evidence of psychological damage, you claim the evidence is not good enough.
A reasonable statement, however I don't consider one paper to be enough evidence for restructuring the entire English language to avoid white/black, light/dark concepts. Not to mention academia is a massive political bubble which is clearly influencing the social sciences right now.
We're clearly not going to see eye to eye here - but I wish you a good day.
That's a strawman. No one is restructuring the entire English language. There is a small list of words used in technology that companies are changing to more accurate words. "denylist" and "allowlist" are clearer in purpose and intent than "blacklist".
You want to rewrite parts the language because a few people are offended? Do you realize how often people are offended at the most miniscule and obnoxious things? I think the slippery slope argument applies here.
Secondly, from looking at the history of the term whitelist/blacklist, they are not rooted racially. Why does there need to be any more discussion here?
This isn't PoC crying for change. This is a bunch of privileged white people sitting around wondering what words they should replace while PoC are getting gunned down by the powers that be.
No I don't. I want to use the word denylist instead of blacklist. So do other people and companies. Other words have gone in and out of fashion without rewriting parts of the language. Yes, the slippery slope logical fallacy definitely applies here. You are greatly exaggerating what's happening or what could happen as the result of using a word with a clearer meaning, in professional settings.
> the history of the term whitelist/blacklist, they are not rooted racially.
The continued use of the word black to mean "evil" in the workplace and white to mean "good" while those terms both also apply to people's race is the history of the past few decades. In a society where people are being systemically oppressed on the basis of race. And it just so happens "coincidentally" that it is the oppressed minority that gets to hear that the same name for their race means "evil" on a regular basis at work. No thanks.
> Do you realize how often people are offended at the most miniscule and obnoxious things?
> This isn't PoC crying for change.
Choose one?
PoC are asking for change about these specific terms, and it came up as early as the 1970s. This has been an ongoing conversation that you have not been a part of. A simple search will help you educate yourself about the specific PoC who have complained in various formats including scholarly articles, presentations at public meetings, as well as editorials, and blogs. In addition to these specific terms, the larger subject under which this falls is microagressions, and you will find countless sources from PoC talking about that issue and why it is important to fix.
Humongous strawman. Blacklists aren't inherently 'bad', but you've applied that label to it. You could just as easily argue that blacklists are good, i.e. prevent DoS attacks or spam. Conversely you can argue that whitelists are good.
> A simple search will help you educate yourself about the specific PoC who have complained in various formats including scholarly articles, presentations at public meetings, as well as editorials, and blogs.
No, the onus is on you if you want to change language. It is not something people will just do without being convinced.
I'm not denying positive motivations, I'm just skeptical of the actual impact, which is why we're having this discussion. I'm happy to be convinced, but these ideas aren't holding up to my personal scrutiny and I do not think I'm an isolated case.
Learning is about attacking ideas to prove their merit, as well.
It is not. That's exactly why I suggested you do a search and prove yourself wrong. Just as one of many examples, here is Google talking about it 2 years ago: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=842296
Which itself cites a source from 2014.
If you look hard enough you can find sources going all the way back to the 1970s talking about these exact words and why they are problematic. This is not new. It's just finally hitting the knee of the curve and loads of companies are doing this all at the same time.
> I, and my country, do not share these problems.
Your country definitely has a racism problem. Where do you live? We'll give you a fucking enormous list of both the historic racism and current day racism for that country.
This stuff makes me extremely uncomfortable. I can't keep up with the way that these rules change, and it makes me fearful that I'm going to accidentally say the wrong thing and have my life ruined, despite what my intent might have been.
It's gotten to the point where during this latest culture war flare up, I am avoiding going to work, my anxiety has increased to the point where I have to use xanax to manage it again, and my productivity has dropped off completely. I am terrified of saying the wrong thing, or meaning to say the right thing but saying it in the wrong way. I have done my normal "hacker" thing and tried to research as much into the grievances that people have so that I can understand them and help work towards change, but that has led me to finding out that some things are considered "hate facts" and you can be labeled a racist for even knowing that they are true.
These things are effecting my relationships. I'm avoiding some of my friends because of this. I'm afraid to read anything about this for fear of not knowing which things are "hate facts" and which aren't. This is terrifying.
The state of the world as it is right now is legitimately terrifying to me. I've worked my whole life against racism, against ever biasing myself in any way against people because of things that they can't change, and right now there are so many things, every day, telling me that I'm a monster because of who I am. I almost can't describe to you all how depressing this all is.
I'm not a monster. I care about people a lot and I go out of my way as much as possible to help them when I can.
Ironically, outside the US the "Black edition MasterCard" is the top offer (named so, because (surprise) the card is black).
Github just wants to change it to "main". It won't change existing repositories and you can rename it to anything you want afterwards, including "master".
GitHub must work with Git & make this a proper change if they want to do this. Change the submodules specification as well.
[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmodules#Documentation/gitmodules...
But the "master" branch in Git doesn't have a slave branch. It's a master from which copies are made (as in a "master recording"), which is a different sense of the word.
I talked about this today with a black coworker (obviously doesn't represent the feelings of all black people etc), and he actually got quite angry about it - but he was angry at the idea of changing master to main, not the idea of keeping it! From his perspective, it's nothing more than virue signalling, a distraction from real issues. He also thought it risked ridicule, and that things like this risk turning people against real change. He did kind of see the point about the separate blacklist/whitelist debate though.
Personally, instead of "master" I like the word "trunk", as I think it goes well with the branching concept.
A pupil of mine was quite shocked to see an IDE cable labelled as such
If you’re already willing to use metaphorical terms with unsettling connotations for things just because they’re fitting, then a more precise pair of terms for the setup on a drive cable would be “dominant” and “submissive”! (It’s not like we don’t already use “dominant” metaphorically in tons of dry ways, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominator_(graph_theory). We tend to avoid “submissive”, though, and that’s a shame; “voluntarily relinquishing control” is a very useful concept to get across in a single word.)
Coordinator/Worker
Central/Auxiliary
Conductor/Player
We're making a metaphor here. There are many metaphors one could pick to describe a situation where one unit calls the shots and the others cooperate.
For IDE, not that it's around anymore, primary/secondary works perfectly. For electing something to control your distributed system "leader election" makes just as much sense as "master election". For git, "main" is 2 letters shorter than "master", and makes sense.
All in all, this is good thing.
Perhaps we should rename "kill" to "terminate" as well, because black people experience killings by police and may see it as offensive? Killings by police seem to be more disturbing to black people at the current time than slavery, or more raw at least. Even "terminate" may still be seen as offensive.
One might argue that slavery is more racially charged, but it's not any more than killing is. Millions of non-blacks were slaves across almost every single culture. If you look up news results for "killing" almost every single article is a bout a black killed by police, similar to how "slavery" would return news results almost entirely consisting of references to black slavery. If the meaning of words are fluid and more impactful to some than others, then "killing" and "slavery" are equally racially charged.
In reality, they should just drop this, or call the branch "non_feature", better yet "non_feature_not_that_there_is_anything_wrong_with_being_a_feature"
This from GitHub, however, makes no sense.
The word "master" is overloaded. In the sense used in source control, the term has nothing to do with slavery or servitude; it simply is "an original from which copies can be made." In fact, in all of my 10 years of using git, I have yet to see a "slave" branch or anything implying servitude of any kind. And this is ignoring the fact that distributed source control is an inherently egalitarian and liberating proposition (centralized services like GitHub itself notwithstanding).
And who will benefit from this? What person suffering from oppression is going to be helped by being spared from seeing the word "master" (even without a concomitant term suggesting servitude)?
Count me out. I'll keep naming my default branch "master," because that's what it is: an original from which to make copies.
EDIT: In fact, I'd go so far as to say this will only harm the people it's trying to help. How much documentation exists out in the wild referring to the "master" branch? Who is more likely to rely on cobbled together Internet documentation when learning something new and relatively complicated like Git: a person of color without much support or mentorship, or a person from overrepresented groups who can likely just find a friend to ask? How is a person without much of a support network and trying to get into tech going to react when she has read about "checkout master," only to get to GitHub and see only "main."
Overloading of words is no longer allowed. See also: people can’t refer to their non-binary gender as “NB” because that means "non-black” in the context of race; polyamarous people can’t refer to their relationship style as “poly” because that is stealing the word from the Polynesians; etc :P
So, what's the difference?
It's not like a small team inside GitHub is going to deplete the world's activism budget and this will hinder the advance of other definitely more important changes.
I'm sure they will find a way to offer minimal impacts, specially because it's just a default value that can be easily configured.
So if you push master to Github, how is this going to work ?
Is it not better to make the changes to Git ?
Ask Linus Torvald in Finland.
I'm assuming github are just going to alias it in the UI. I'd hate to have used both a master and a main branch before this.
If I'm going to rename my default branch, it'll likely be "release" or "final" or something.
I remain astounded that nobody seems to want to use this, when there's already existing architectural practices surrounding it.
I feel the same way about "denylist" versus "blocklist". "Denylist" is more precise, but I think "blocklist" would make for an easier transition.
> "Virtue signalling" is a pejorative neologism for the conspicuous expression of moral values, when performed to make oneself look virtuous to others.
"a foolish or worthless person", per https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/git
This is about Github.
Its the master copy/record.
Its not the same as like the db master slave which i totally think needs looking at.
But etymology doesn't matter. If it would, "negro" wouldn't be a word to avoid. Actual use would matter, but the context doesn't seem to warrant that.
So right now we are watching words change meaning.
And that has something to do with explaining the long string of assumptions that nobody is willing to address?
https://mobile.twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441
Woops.
Git uses master on its own for the master branch.
Master has multiple meanings, only one of which is not racist, but insensitive to use.
Bitkeeper, an earlier vcs uses the terminology master/slave branches.
And that some how transfers to git? Because the kernel used to use bitkeeper?
Thats a stretch.
And github starts renaming it because?
Its virtue signaling instead of doing something worthwhile?
https://mobile.twitter.com/xpasky/status/1272280760280637441
Wonder if some people want to push for a rename. I won't be surprised
Just a lot of bitching and moaning. Why are y’all so offended? What we call things matter, read Wittgenstein
Anyone who is bitching about this doesn’t do shit to help With race relations in real life so why do people here give their opinion so much credence, besides this being a WASP nest