I am genuinely curious: the LibreOffice team changed the file blacklist to excludelist. Do you believe this was just tokenism? I personally thought it was a great thing. But I am interested in hearing your perspective.
In my view, if the goal is productive discourse, every contentious social justice scenario demands a nuanced parsing of the facts.
I'm not familiar with the LibreOffice change, but from what I can tell, it doesn't seem like this change was delivered with any fanfare or something like an official blogpost targeting the general public and presented as an effort towards inclusion and social justice. Instead, it seems to be treated by the developers in a manner that reflects exactly what it is, a trivial relabeling, perhaps in a positive direction, but one that doesn't merit injection into the wider discourse over racial justice. The developers made this change based on their personal values and in a way that doesn't interrupt the natural workflow of the users which inevitably draws scrutiny and creates contention. I'm all for developers using whatever labels align with their values, where I have a problem is the pronouncement of such trivialities as if they represent something meaningful.
Imho meaningless lip service: master branch -> main branch
Also imho the most insulting towards PoC and everyone else for that matter is to patronisingly assume people can't comprehend context, as OP's article points it out.
I believe that usage of 'master' in git was copied from bitkeeper which did reference the master/slave relationship.
Whereas blacklist in its original forms was used outside of a racial context. I think it'll be pretty hard to try to break the association between black (the color) and night, hiddenness, unknown, sin, fear, etc. All of which are pretty negative, but not originally racial.
I find it difficult to distinguish one of these changes from the other in terms of usefulness.
I also don't hold much truck with the 'insulting' and 'patronising' thing. It's perfectly possible for a white person to prefer to remove inappropriate and confusing terminology that trivialised historical injustices and/or glorified things they disagree with regardless of whether or not non-white people are offended by such usage. There seems to be an underlying view that a white person could only want to change such usage for inauthentic reasons. If we want to find things patronising, I find that patronising. Just because you're white doesn't mean you can't hold an authentic position of your own on these topics.
> I believe that usage of 'master' in git was copied from bitkeeper which did reference the master/slave relationship.
The (likely) basis for this belief, the GNOME mailing list post[0] that reignited this discussion in 2019, was retracted the next year[1].
I wrote a summary of the history[2] for Git Rev News, the git developers newsletter. In short, the usage didn't come from BitKeeper, and was intended to mean 'master copy'.
After the article was published, Aaron Kushner from BitKeeper reached out and gave me some more history on the usage of 'slave repository' in that one particular spot in BitKeeper[3]: it was a presentation for a client that was already using master/slave terminology and so the same terms were used in the presentation.
