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GitHub will no longer use the term 'master' as default branch because of negative association (mobile.twitter.com)

submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

There is no negative connotation here. Git doesn't use the term slave anywhere so that relation doesn't exist.

it removes the negative connotation of black.

So you're associating black people with slavery? (Isn't that a bit racist? That association doesn't make sense if you look at history, unless you only care about the US.)

If we're talking about terms like blacklist and whitelist, those originated way earlier, and have no relation to slavery or skin color. Deriving meaning from colors doesn't imply associating those meanings with skin color.

What about terms like Master's Degree, master recording, mastery (of a certain skill), master bedroom, gamemaster, etc. None have any racist connotation. I don't think this change will do anything, as the term master is, on its overwhelming majority of uses, not racist.

In fact, I see this whole endeavor bringing a negative connotation to the word master when it didn't exist previously.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

So if the brain sees lots of negative things that are black and positive things that are white, it thinks “Ah! i don’t have remember that whitelist is contains good things, i can simplify that by remembering that whiteness is good”

And there it is, subtle racism is born.

And when you want to scream “Noooo!!!” remember i speak about subtle things here

I agree with you up until this point. I don't see how racism can come from there. In fact, I never realized someone could make that association. Because if someone thinks that that association is valid, they were already racist to begin with. Associating meanings of colors to skin colors isn't something someone would come up with were they not racist.

Besides, do you really think racism comes from any kind of intelligent reasoning? Most racist people are educated to become racist, and racism started from fear of the unknown and the different, not from reason.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

For instance, the old lady in the bus, who presses her bag harder to her chest, because of subtle fear of getting robbed. I agree that it is racist when she would think “oh, a black women, she wants to steal!”. But in this case, she probably hardly notices that she grabs her bag stronger because of a black women entering the bus.

The above is actually happend, according to alice haster. She (alice hasters) experienced that, as a black person, she noticed that the women would grab her bag stronger after seeing her.

I don't question that.

I also didn’t notice before, that “skincolor” (as in the color of a color-pencil) was always white-ish for me. when i thought of skincolor, i never thought of black skin.

I don't see that as racist, people think of themselves first, that's natural.

I was once part of a german conference, with many people. A black person said something during the conference and after the conference i met this same person again. Because i wanted to ask this person something, i started to speak english. Altough this same person had spoken perfect german a few hours ago.

So the natural assumption was that this person was a foreigner who doesn’t speak german. This is a racist stereotype. And altough i corrected myself in this situation, i didn’t notice the racist part until i drove home a few hours later.

I don't think that's racist, it's just an assumption people make based on their experiences: you know what the "locals" typically look like, so it's not that farfetched to think that anyone that looks significantly different (due to their skin color, clothing, hair, etc.) is probably a foreigner.

Going back to your first example, I think these kinds of things happen because the person is unfamiliar (has little meaningful contact) with people of other races or because of stereotypes, like you mentioned. I don't think avoiding a word vaguely related to slavery will make a difference on either of those things.