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Comment by gher-shyu3i | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't the discussion that it's also quite racist to associate the word "slave" with Blacks/Africans? People don't seem to know any history when they say that. It's not only Africans that got enslaved, peoples of all ethnicities did.

It's just virtue signaling at the end of the day. It's ridiculous watch everyone fight over this while missing the root cause.

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It's a valid point, two thoughts:

1. There's the state of slavery today, which is actually pretty horrible worldwide.

2. There's the issue of race relations in the USA, and the historical context of those relations. In the American context, I think it's fair to focus on that context. At least, I think it's counterproductive to try and redefine the term because it deemphasizes that context.

I'm sorry, but you've got it completely backwards. If you're doing a word association and the first thing you think of for 'black' or 'African American' is 'slave', then yeah that's racist. But slavery in America (and we are talking about America here, Github is based in the US, not ancient Rome) was 100% connected with and built on top of notions of racial superiority. Addressing issues of racism today does require us to ignore or downplay racism in history.

"It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States." — Thomas Sowell

this is a stupid argument, the African slave trade and it's ramifications are so throughly discussed in America because it is the main type of slavery that occurred in the US

Of course it's also a fallacy to lump the entire phenomenon of slavery under one umbrella. Islam does not allow enslaving people just by attacking them and taking them hostage as what the US did with Africa. Furthermore, the system is fundamentally different under Islam, so much so that the Mamluk Sultanate came to be, something unprecedented in human history.

That seems like a completely valid point: Can we still use the terms master/slave when actually discussing the atrocious history of slavery in America? Why are these words considered hateful? They are useful words that describe a concept very clearly.

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