> I don't think there is a racial bias in associating blackness w/ evil or 'whiteness' with good, I rather think it has to do with night/darkness vs day/light. Do you think 'red' as a widely used 'warning light' somehow relates to 'native Americans'?
I think maybe I didn’t make my point clear here. I don’t think that in these particular examples there exists racial bias in the language. The language (most languages) is biased (but not racially) towards associating darkness with evil and light with good. If you personally are experiencing racial bias due to having darker skin, I think language like this can feel very different than it would otherwise, even if the language itself is not explicitly racially biased. I’m not saying we should abandon the whole light/dark evil/good dichotomy, but just pointing out that things built in to the culture that aren’t technically related to race in any way may feel very different if you’re on the “good” side than if you’re on the “bad” side.
> It's not at all difficult to assume that something is offensive to someone, but not to me. It's extremely easy that for any different person, different phrases are considered offensive. But the solution of 'let's create a world where nothing is offensive anymore' seems ludicrous.
I agree that it seems impossible to avoid offending every individual. But, when it’s so easy to avoid using language that has negative connotations for a significant portion of the population, why shouldn’t we? Why cling so tightly to not being kind, out of some kind of slippery-slope assumption that if we give ground and have empathy this once, the word will end?
It’s really odd to me how offended people get by the suggestion that there might be something offensive about the language they use. I have no ties to the words I use. If I want to be friends with someone or to include them in what I’m doing, and they have a problem with some word I use because of some context that I haven’t experienced, it does me no harm to use a different word.
> I always thought there was a 'common sense' approach, pruning any mention of 'slave' as terminology in programming / system administration after decades of use for me seems to be extremely far away from it.
Here I think you’re taking offense at a situation that doesn’t exist. What I’ve seen is people trying to avoid perpetuating the problem by not adding new instances of the world slave to new code/systems, or making updates to use different language when it’s convenient and someone’s already touching the code. These actions hardly seem to me to be pruning any mention of the term from decades’ worth of software.
Language, it’s important to remember, is descriptive, not prescriptive. It is always changing along with society and culture. It’s therefore natural that what is considered acceptable or not is going to change over time, and we’ve always had to deal with this as a society. Look at people wanting to ban books for using words that have become offensive, as an example. The interesting thing about software, as opposed to books or words engraved in stone on monuments, is that it’s often very easy to change the words that are used, because software isn’t a historical artifact but a living thing. And as a living thing, people are going to want it to reflect their own current societal norms. So changes like this seem an inevitable part of a long-lived industry that creates such mutable products.
Regardless, it hardly seems worth getting so worked up over someone else choosing to make this decision in the codebase that they maintain. It is their right as maintainers to do so, and if you disagree so strongly with them making this small token of empathy, you can of course choose to use another filesystem.