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'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts

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dave j:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on June 15, 2020, 01:47:25 pm ---Six meanings for one word, not strictly including the sense of master/slave as in flip-flops. That leads me to wonder aloud: "Does this mean that the people complaining about the use of 'master' in the technical sense are just not very good at English comprehension?".

--- End quote ---
It might be they are just familiar enough with English to know that some people deliberately use words with multiple meanings so they can claim they meant a non-offensive one when challenged. Sometimes they do it deliberately to cause controversy. Sometimes it's as part of dog whistling (whether political or not). Other times they are too cowardly to admit they meant to be offensive and try to weasel out of taking responsibility for their actions.

GlennSprigg:
Well said, Nominal Animal,  and I've also learnt a bit more about your side of this Planet!!

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 15, 2020, 02:20:59 pm ---I suspect these people refuse to think rationally, and instead emote; certain posts in this thread have enforced that suspicion even further.

--- End quote ---

I think that it's more probably the other way around. Acting instinctively and emotionally is the default human condition, it takes a 'pause for thought' and effort to be strictly rational about something.

If you perceive something unusual, perhaps out of the corner of your eye, or you hear an unusual noise, your immediate reaction is emotional, instinctive. Your brain goes "unusual = possibly a threat" and it takes much longer before you go "Oh, it's only a shadow" or "It's an unexpected small child jumping out and shouting". I suspect that this innate response is the basis of all racist type behaviour. The rational man goes "Oh, he's just like me, just a different skin colour/has round eyes/has a different traditional costume", the irrational clings to his initial fear response and rationalizes the fear (rather than rationalizing the non-threat). Familiarity is important too - I grew up in a town that was almost exclusively white and when I first moved to London I was very aware of black faces on the street. I now live in a London borough where "white British" makes up 14% of the population and not only do I not notice someone's race, on a trip to Scotland a few years back it felt 'odd' to be on a street where all the faces were white. I didn't become instinctively non-racist by some effort of the will or intellect, but just by everyday familiarity making "not white" something that even the base, instinctive processes of my brain don't bother to process.

Conversely, the response here to the calls to "rename anything that might be remotely associated with race" is an instinctive, emotional one. The response has often been "Are you calling me a racist?" in the same vein as "Did you just spill my pint?". It's quite understandable and calls on us to make the intellectual effort to listen, think and analyse. After doing that, I still think that renaming master/slave flip-flops et al is a nonsense and that the call to do so is an emotional one ("won't someone think of the children") and in my harsher moments think that the call is being made by people who would are (1) unaffected by it, and (2) rather make a noise about something than stop, think, and do something constructive.

That the debate is being held in apparently adult words doesn't preclude that the underlying interaction is emotional. In terms of Eric Berne's transactional analysis the apparent debate is an 'adult <=> adult' transaction, but the actual underlying interaction is 'child <=> child'. The call for renaming is an apparent 'parent => child' transaction and our instinctive reaction is the teenager's "I hate you". In fact, now I start thinking in terms of transactional analysis (one of the few bits of psychological theory that doesn't seem like complete hooey to me) it sounds like a very useful tool for analyzing/managing this 'debate'.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: nuclearcat on June 15, 2020, 02:19:04 pm ---I got much more interesting observation.

--- End quote ---

I think that it's up to your readers to decide if it's "more interesting".  :)

But seriously, it's an interesting point; I don't know if it's true, but it's food for thought.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: madires on June 15, 2020, 02:08:41 pm ---
--- Quote from: fcb on June 15, 2020, 01:56:22 pm ---Could black and white lists be changed to RED and GREEN, or do they have other meanings in computing?

--- End quote ---

whitelist -> allowlist
blacklist -> blocklist

I've just seen that in the slides of a NANOG-79 talk about RPKI two weeks ago. Seems to be an early adopter.

--- End quote ---

"blocklist" has been in use for donkey's years, from well before anyone (other than a drunk sociology student) was going to take issue with "blacklist" as covert racism.

As I've said elsewhere, English heavily overloads words. Any attempt to blackball the overloaded word "black", except as a strict colour designation is doomed to failure. My dictionary lists 13 different uses of black as an adjective, 7 as a noun, 2 as a verb (and it's sorely lacking there) and those don't include compound idioms such as blackball.

If we're going to maul the language in the name of non-racism, let's invent a new word specifically to describe 'black' people - who of course aren't actually black (apart from one Nigerian chap I once met). If we can invent the festival of "Kwanzaa" out of whole cloth perhaps we can repurpose the word and start calling all the people we currently call "black" kwanzaans, it has the merits of having roots in a specifically "black" cultural phenomenon. Then there ought to be no question whether one's use of 'black' is crypto-racism.

Edited to add:

This isn't entirely unrealistic. We used to refer to people as "Negroes" or to "coloured people" and those terms have been deprecated for "black" or "people of colour". If we can manage that transition, why not one to a novel term that unambiguously identifies "people of ultimately African decent with skin that is not some shade of pink or a Mediterranean skin colour".

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