Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

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> like yeah, the only reason I don't commit to the Linux kernel is because of the presence of words such as master/slave...

I'm not certain about this but personally I don't think this is the intent.

I see two big benefits of these big language changes:

1. Much of anti-black racism in history has been accompanied by associations of skin colour to other unrelated elements based on their "illumination". Negative associations have been highlighted by virtue of the darkness and unilluminated things in general being traditionally considered negative.

So the original meaning or intent of blacklist/whitelist doesn't need to have been race-related for it to reinforce the idea of black=negative & white=positive. This is an association that's as natural as kids being afraid of the dark, but an association that is helpful for us to subvert and overcome as adults (for a plethora of reasons, one of those being to do with race)

Having discussions about language and naming things helps with that subversion.

2. In my case, as I work for a company that is bringing in these name changes internally, I've found this a curious and positive rare opportunity to discuss & hear team members' views on this issue. It's not the type of topic that would normally be easy to bring up in a corporate environment and this makes it natural and "safe" to do so in a not-combative way.

Normally I'd call reductio ad absurdum but we're pretty much already there.

This idea that dark is negative is kind of silly. Things that are done in the shadows tend to be referred to as black, such as a black market. You want to call it a shadow market? (And don't get me wrong that sounds cool as hell, but also, wtf)

Look at the positives instead, unless the color is the problem in which case your accountants I'm sure will be overjoyed to hear that they should no longer say the company is "in the black" either.

I don't mean this to sound combative but rather simply make you think about what it is that time is being spent on.

Remember that whenever this particular change is brought up, whenever people talk about it, all the energy being expended on it etc. It all draws away from much more important business such as the George Floyd protests.

Black lives matter. This doesn't.

We have a ton of these connotations:

- left/sinister is negative compared to right

- low is negative compared to high (“moral highground”)

- south is negative compared to north (“things going south lately”)

Regardless of neutral usages of these words, or their factual meaning, we should acknowledge the more connotated meaning are not completely separate, and bleed on the other uses of the words.

It doesn’t mean they can’t be used with their actual meaning, but I think we should be open to the risk we’d need to stop using them in context where the connotations bleed too strong.

And I guess we reached that point for white/black/dark.

I think the issue is not that the changes don't matter but that they end up being a substitute for addressing the real problem of structural racism.

A CS analogy: Using a linter is good, but it doesn't fix bugs in your code. Pretending it does keeps you from fixing them.

Who is pretending? Your very own analogy is a great argument in favor: Use linters! It's your personal problem if you think the rest of us assume that solves a bigger problem.

Theory where naming association causes some real effects and real negative outcomes is not supported by science. It's just fringe linguist theory.

Of course naming is easier busywork than for example being transparent about wages etc. that have real effect.

> Negative associations have been highlighted by virtue of the darkness and unilluminated things in general being traditionally considered negative.

It really depends where you go. Contrary to popular belief, America is not the center of the universe...

Your argument associates Black = Bad = Black people. But as an example, they don't do this in Russia. Yes, they do associate Black = Bad to an extent, but black people do not come into the picture at all!

I'm fairly sure that when I say they're not racist towards black people, I say it for every Slavic country out there.

So it really does matter where you go when making that kind of claim about ethnically motivated interpretations behind words. We might need to go as far as to appreciate if/when the complete opposite of Black = Bad may be true.

This action on the whole though needs to be careful about whether it is doing anybody any favors, by trying to force the speaker's /intent/ about what was said, where none was necessarily had to begin with.

On the whole, you can't just change people by changing words. You have to show them a reason to WANT to change. The bigger the change, the more powerful reason you have to give them. Telling people what they /meant/ though, is not quite the same as trying to fix a racism problem.

> Contrary to popular belief, America is not the center of the universe...

Contrary to popular assumption, not everyone commenting on this website is American. I'm not; I'm European and have never lived in the States.

> I'm fairly sure that when I say they're not racist towards black people, I say it for every Slavic country out there.

Not Slavic, but my SO is. This sentence is mindnumbingly naïve. There is no country on this planet where racism does not exist.

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