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Comment by marvion | Hacker News Reader

> Frankly, I find it disturbing how attached so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology.

I was about to write that too. I'm not quite sure if I find the change necessary - but who am I to raise my word against it. I'm a white guy, it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations and that's enough for me to let them decide.

I just listened to a podcast about "whiteness studies" maybe that enforced my opinion on this - but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion. Be open, be welcome, accept diversity is a main rule in many projects. Why would I not want to change something that others consider harmful(especially something as simple as wording)

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> I'm a white guy

So you're not entitled to an opinion? That's the sort of self-deprecation that the far left wants you to have, and I say this as a non-White myself.

Read up on world history, not just American history, and you'll see that slavery spanned not just Blacks, but all sorts of races, including whites.

> but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion

Because it's past the point where it became absurd, nothing to do with you being white or otherwise. I'm all for treating people properly and with respect and dignity, but at the same time lets not lose our minds here.

> it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations

how? it only represents a kind of relationship (a terrible one, yes) between people. But it's only a historic terminology.

Killer is a word that, following that logic, has negative connotations and it is used when people say "that's a killer feature". Stopping using those terms won't make past events to disappear. At worst, they'll be forgotten, making it possible for history to repeat itself.

Killer and master/slave are very different. "Killing" has rarely singled out one specific ground of people and subjugated them for centuries. In cases where it has, you don't use the word. Imagine naming a program that kills a bunch of processes on a box “holocaust”.

But let's run with "killing" for a bit. If, hypothetically, you had a coworker whose family was murdered by a serial killer, wouldn't you be careful about using “He killed it out there” and similar terms around them? Or do you sit around logically proving why the context is different?

Those are fair points but I still don't think we are helping anyone with this over-protection. Would you hesitate to say that expression without knowing that coworker's background? Should he/she be offended when there isn't malicious intent behind those words? It looks to me more sensible and a better long term solution to help this person to deal with his/her emotions instead of trying to change everybody around them.

> Would you hesitate to say that expression without knowing that coworker's background?

Ok. But. The discussion is about specific expressions almost everybody knows, not just random words. One of those words is `slave`.

> It looks to me more sensible and a better long term solution to help this person to deal with his/her emotions instead of trying to change everybody around them.

I think this only applies to situations in which one specific person has specific triggers who are e.g. tight to an psychological trauma...

> "Killing" has rarely singled out one specific ground of people and subjugated them for centuries

While the term holocaust mainly refers to what the Jews went through during WWII, slavery encompassed not just blacks, but many other races including whites. The problem here is that the "discussion" happening is extremely US centric, that non-Americans are either looking at it as absurd, or they've become so Americanized that they think it's correct, meaning they also have no proper critical thinking skills and are easily swayed.

If it was actually a wholesale destruction by fire or something similarly final, I'd have no problem calling such a process a "Holocaust".

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