> but also terms like "blacklist" and "whitelist" for "allow list" and "deny/exclude list."
Seriously?
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.
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?
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.
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...
Rosstex posted a good explain below.
I can't tattoo a swastika on my arm, despite its origins.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"?
I'm not saying it's the right or wrong thing to do.
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...
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.
"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".
> 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.
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.