Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
newsobserver.com
newsobserver.com
(edited: I referred to this group as "BLM core", but I realize that's confusing to some)
To be clear- I also think the terms are problematic and my company is also pushing for it. But I think it's worth asking whether we're speaking over actual black people. It does give off pretty heavy white guilt vibes.
Edit: I think a good example of this is the fact that my company is pushing for this change but still doesn't have a single black person at the VP+ levels. It's pandering, and distracting from the core problem.
Black programmers have been asking and pushing for this change for some time and many open source projects (which lack "corporate diversity teams") have acted independently to address this because it's an issue that's been raised by black programmers.
> To verify that this [request 'that equipment vendors avoid using the industry term “Master/Slave” in product descriptions and labeling'] wasn’t a hoax or an internal joke which mistakenly escaped to the wider world of the Internet, we called the Purchasing and Contract Services division for the County of Los Angeles, and they informed us that yes, they did issue this message, and yes, it was meant seriously. In May 2003, a black employee of the county’s Probation Department filed a discrimination complaint with the Office of Affirmative Action Compliance after spotting “master” and “slave” labels on a videotape machine, whereupon the Internal Services Department was obligated to issue notification requesting that vendors refrain from using the master/slave terminology.
So yes, at least one. (FWIW, I think claims of "white guilt" give off a pretty heavy attempt at encouraging white silence.)
Just looking at HN you'll see other evidence, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7806066 :
> Have you ever taught African-American kids about database replication? I'm guessing "no", because the master/slave terminology actively interferes with the learning environment — more so than adopting this less common terminology would.
Or in this HN comment from two years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17930085 :
> A few years ago I was in a meeting talking about database options, hitherto I had used "master/slave" to describe this database topology. In that meeting was an African American co-worker ("Frank") and as the words left my mouth I realized that completely irrespective of my intent I brought into the room the spectre of times past. I've no idea how Frank felt about it - but all of a sudden I had lost all ability to continue my point. I paused and said something that amounted to: "you know,... that phrase is fucked up - let's not use it - what words should we use?" and Frank suggested we look at what terms Amazon uses; they used "source and read replica" and that's what we went with. I've never regretted recoding my use of words on that one.
Or another from 8 years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4617174 :
> A coworker and I were de-duping records in a database. One of us said while pairing on the script "well, every slave needs a master."
> An african american woman in the office turned to us and said "maybe it's the master who needs the slave?"
> She wasn't really offend or anything and she said it with a sincere smile. She was just calling out our idiotic computer lingo for what it was.
> After apologizing feeling like complete idiots we quickly changed our terminology both in words and in the script to parent/child.
Or from 7 years ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5423626 referenced Matthew Haughey/mathowie's comment at https://www.metafilter.com/126184/Furore-over-sexism-being-c... :
> All this talk about forking being offensive-or-no reminds me of a few years ago when someone pointed out to me that the whole hard drive relationship talk in IT circles of "Master" and "Slave" drives was offensive to them, being that they were black.
If you can't get the small problems fixed, can you really fix the large ones? What are the relevant core problems in your company which this distracts from, who is arguing that this change is something other than a no-brainer change, and what is their reason?
Why would this affect anyone getting pulled over by the police? Neither the police, nor the motorist are going to be looking over source code.
This is 100% about black developers. Have you bothered asking black developers how they feel about this?
I can easily see how some people might be made uncomfortable by the existing wording, but more importantly, I can see no downside to changing it.
It will be a very small amount of work for a very small amount of time and then everything will carry on as normal. If this helps make programming more inclusive, even in a small way, then I'm all for it.
Is this the last remaining piece of racism in our society? No.
In my own experiences, being actively welcoming provides a level of safety that silence will not, because the status quo is that it is not safe for me to be myself, even if I might plausibly be accepted among my specific peer group.
Overall, these are small changes (what github is doing notwithstanding), and the amount of time onlookers have spent whinging about them far exceeds the time spent making the changes.
No, this won't address the most pressing systematic abuses by minorities, but it does make one of the most lucrative careers less actively hostile to them.
But the comments here so far don't seem to do that, they seem to just be against this, with no alternative.
Top comment from an earlier discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23501861
My concern is that this is motivated by the politician’s fallacy.
Never in my life even for a second I had any connotation between words master and slave used in IT and any derogatory meaning for anybody. I don't remember a single instance in the past 20 years when I could possibly link any utterance of these words in IT setting to any kind of discrimination, derogatory meaning.
These words are just statement of facts, describing relationship. If not these, there will be other words to state exact same relationship with exact same meaning. Contrast this with the N word which is clearly derogatory.
Are we going to be renaming colors, too? Am I going to find a new name for the color of my car?
If you care for black lives, cooperating to find and work on an actual solution seems to me much more worth your while and shooting in everything that moves is wasting time at a critical point when time is of the essence.
These kinds of moves are only going to entrench the opposition, giving more arguments against and achieve nothing.
Yes there is. If you set a precedent that you're going to cave whenever someone says they are offended, you're going to attract trolls pretending to be offended so they can have a laugh at your expense[1]. The whole master/main controversy might be genuine, but it's only a matter of time before 4chan comes up with another word/phrase for whites to be guilty about, and therefore need to be changed.
I just did some changes in a project I'm doing, and it's like 5 or 10 minutes work in my case.
Neither can Master Wayne, according to Alfred, who is as polite as a school master. Of course, the Dark Knight did not have a masters degree, nor the spirituality of a Zen master, nor the concentration of a chess master. I am a certified dive master. I was close friends with several build masters. Of the great masters, Monet is my favorite. I hope to master my fear. Seinfeld fans still joke about being masters of their domain.
No downside indeed. Might as well sail into the sun on a three-master.
Uh. "Workers" has slave connotations. Employees. Wards of the State of Private Prisons. Hard Labor = Slave Labor. Are pregnant women now offended? WoMAN. I mean FeMALE. Damn this is hard..
Allowlist/denylist are perfectly fine if everybody uses them. But fragmented blocklist/denylist/etc sucks.
A lot of the suggestions for master/slave don't illustrate the same relationship between components, roles.
It's a renaming of mostly internal identifiers, a somewhat minor change for those implementing it, and a complete non-issue for anyone else. It doesn't matter if you are offended by the terms or not. Your opinion is somewhat irrelevant for once.
The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism.
Additionally, this issue has grown in salience precisely because people opposed it.
Agitating against such changes is just as emotional as the proponents are accused of being, only the justification is far more transparently dishonest considering the relative ease of this change as outlined above.
People will invariably profess to be willing to help overcome the lingering effects of hundreds of years of slavery and continuing racism. But when they get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to happen.
Not because anyone is racist, of course. No, this is about ethics-in-datastructure-identifiers.
I don't think this is true.
This particular topic seems to trigger a vocal group of people, but in general this community isn't terrible.
> But when they get the chance to do so, with the barest minimum effort, it's not going to happen.
This is what frustrates me most. In this particular case people don't even have to make an effort, they just need to be tolerant of efforts made by others and still we get the shouting.
My companies black systems architect just finished a whitelist feature and delivered it this morning. Should I, as a dutiful white frontend dev, inform him:
a) that this was in fact a racist decision and he may be a racist or rationally motivated.
b) that he's been oppressed by the whiteman for so long that he doesn't even know how racist this is, thus awakening his mind to the countless micro-aggressions around him
c) do nothing, because this is stupid virtue signaling by marketing teams fueled by white guilt ridding the wave of a woke-movement that, at worse, will get them a neutral "whatever" response or some scoffs, and at best, a pat on the shoulder from the woke twitter-verse?
Please let me know of your selection by reply and I will carry out the appropriate action and report back.
In any case: it: your college does not single-handedly represent all Black people. Assuming that he does is the same basic mechanism as pointing at one red-haired criminal to support your theory of higher criminality among redheads.
The disadvantaged group of any discrimination also isn't itself exempt from actively perpetuating that structure. It's almost a cliché, for example, that female leaders sometimes act extremely aggressive, especially with female employees, in an overzealous effort to fit in, or to dispel any notions of nepotism.
No, it's actually nothing like that at all but I can see how tempting it was for you to make a false equivalency in order to support the point you wanted to make anyway.
In actuality, it's a very real and current example of how my colleague, the guy who directs all the devs at our organization and happens to be black doesn't give a shit.
> The disadvantaged group of any discrimination also isn't itself exempt from actively perpetuating that structure.
I see, so option b then. A balsy choice to be sure, I have to wonder if you'd have the stones to mansplain to your black supervisor that he or she is perpetuating a racial system. Based on your choice I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're also perpetuating a stereotype, that of the white guilt avenger. Please do correct me and explain why I'm wrong and a bigot though.
When these phrases are being replaced, their replacements are almost always more descriptive terms for that specific project, and the way those servers interact.
For example- In Jenkins you run a "master" which schedules jobs, and "slaves" which run the jobs. After they updated their terminology, they referred to the job-runner as a "Agents."
This makes it much clearer what the relationship is between them, and clarifies that the "Slave" servers aren't some sort of failover server, which is how a DB might use the same terms.
I've seem other projects use primary/replica, and several other variations, but they almost always seem to be much better fits for what the software is actually doing.
Many, many words hold additional meanings that aren't obvious to the mainstream.
We did that… and then a week later, got informed that “blocklist” is still racist because it “looks similar to blacklist” and now we need to do a second refactoring to change it to “denylist”
wtf?? Are we going to rename while loops too because it looks too close to "white"? Or blockchain because it looks too close to "blackchain" (slavery reference)?
There's really no benefit to meaningless conflations of human social problems with other things.
I agree with the other comment about assuaging white guilt; it doesn't help someone get hired, talk to the police, or find housing. Those are the issues we need to work on.
You make it sound like this is a bunch of white people unilaterally doing something so they feel better. As if there are no black programmers asking for this change.
https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially...
The whole point of this effort is to make the workplace less hostile for people we work with. Black programmers are part of that.
Guidance would help instead of everybody guessing or corps randomly scrubbing things until the bad PR goes away.
I'm having trouble seeing an issue black developers have been raising for over a decade being called "Randomly Scrubbing". It's been a known pain point for some time.
Words only have the meaning we convey to them and as soon as you put more words in the mix that dilutes any clarity. We're back to the xkcd on standards.
We should also stop using ROBOT which means "forced labor" (slave) in Czech.
Are accountants not to refer to master records?
Do we have to stop killing child processes?
Just today I've caught myself talking about black boxes, no skin off my nose and Chinese whispers, wondering if those are on a list somewhere or if they will be.
I'd say it all feels like papering over the cracks, but the paper isn't even covering the cracks.
In other cases that is less clear, but I've also not seen many people offended for other reasons than the three I mentioned.
It's been a long time but I'm pretty sure I remember changing "master/slave" to "primary/secondary" in a bunch of bind docs.
0. (this might be it) https://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.re...
I, for one, think this is all getting ridiculous now.
Is it actually an issue at all?
Is it possible you actually had a knee-jerk reaction to PC-ness and are retroactively justifying it with logic?
I think it’s common for people (maybe especially engineering types?) to have an emotional reaction to something and find a logical reason for that emotion instead of admitting that maybe they were just being reactionary in the moment.
That is, humans act based on feelings, and rationalize afterwards with logic (like you wrote).
And some of the "logic" in this topic, is quite weird I have to say.
(Personally I like most of these changes, e.g. "replica" or "standby" instead of "slave", also more clear & precise what it means?)