It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology’s problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.
It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology’s problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.
I personally think the whole backlash against master/slave in the computing world is people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of “a movement”. Even if some mustache twirling racist was the first “computer guy” to come up with the term and meant it to be offensive, that is not how sane people view it today. So some of the advocates for changing it should stop trying to build it up into some Pizzagate-like conspiracy against black/brown people.
Having said that, I also don’t have any strong attachments to the phrasing either. Phase it out in favor of something that makes everyone happy if that keeps the peace. It is just a term that made sense at the time to describe something. There is nothing stopping us from changing it to something else now if we so choose. It is not erasing heritage or some such nonsense. If anything, people having strong hangups about it if there are better or equally as good terms out there that doesn’t make people uncomfortable is far weirder in my opinion.
The only thing I have somewhat strong opinions about is making it some high priority to go back and erase those terms from solutions that already exist. Change them as you update things, sure, but why create extra work to update something old that is currently working if the only change is not functional and just verbiage. Seems like wasted effort that could be better directed and solving functional issues to me.
while in some ways I can see your point, I would just have a hard time saying this in a work meeting here in the deep south with black colleagues present
Whitelist and Blacklist is on that stack as well.
this is actually a terminology that i would be interested on seeing the historical context for actually. My assumption has always been light based “whitelist referring to a well lit room, where as blacklist refers to a completely dark room” making things easy/hard to find as a a result.
It could also literally just be a coincidence and it simply sounded better for the allow list to be whitelisted, and the deny list to be blacklisted, humans have weird connections to words like that.
If I had to guess, it’s just the general “white=good black=bad” which itself is likely related to day/night.
But it’s easy to imagine a bouncer at a club with a list of whites allowed in and blacks that aren’t. I don’t think that’s the etymology, but it’s also important to remember that language is alive and words can take on unintended meaning.
that seems like an oddly specific origination for that specific term, but it’s certainly a possibility. But as with words being alive and taking on unintended meanings, it’s also equally likely that it became skin color agnostic at some point, and the term stuck because it was already being used.
I didn’t mean that it originated with bouncers, I meant I imagined it coming to be associated with race in such a way 😅
yeah no i understand, i’m just saying that’s a potential point where i could’ve originated and then morphed over time. Even if it was founded on race originally, it’s not super likely it would matter today in any broader contexts.
Idk if that’s for white folks like me (and you?) to decide, and there is no harm on erring on the side of caution.
It’s like the deal with micro-aggressions. Alone they’re not much, but a constant buildup of these little things can leave someone feeling raw and very sensitive to it.
I don’t think the etymology started with race, I think it started with day/night. But I’m not an expert on etymology, and while I’m very curious, it probably doesn’t really matter here.