Changing offensive language in code

[MirandaBrawnerSavannah]

Hi. I see that there was some discussion last year about changing the offensive terms 'master', and 'blacklist/whitelist'. I fully support the proposal to change them, as I think it's important to avoid engaging in racist language that reinforces harmful stereotypes or trivializes the horrors of slavery.

I was disappointed to see that in the main branch, most of these changes do not seem to have been implemented yet, apart from renaming the branch to 'main'. So I did a fork of the repository and changed blacklist to denylist, whitelist to allowlist, and removed a reference to 'master' that I felt was unnecessary. I ran the tests and everything ran smoothly. I considered changing the words whitelist and blacklist in the change log, but I decided not to, because I wanted to keep an honest record of what the repository was like in the past, and did not want to edit history to make us look better than we are.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions about better ways we might implement these changes, or any other related changes we should make.

Sincerely,
Miranda

[yinzara]

I'm just diametrically apposed to this whole thought process and having to literally break a libraries backward compatibility because of offending people that shouldn't be offended as the terms don't even relate to them.

The only reason the term "master" is offensive is because of its relationship to "slave". The "master/slave" terms in software have long been a thing of the past. Just not used anymore.

But having to rename every single "master" branch of every repository around the world because a group has decided that we have to completely remove the word from our lexicon is ridiculous. Are we supposed to stop using the word "master" all together? Ban it from the dictionary? Come on. There are many other uses of the term: master craftsman, master (referring to a child formally before they're a mister), master bedroom (also on the chopping block it seems), master of the house, all which have nothing to do with the controversy related to slavery.

Additionally, the terms blacklist and whitelist do not trace their etymology back to anything related to race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitelisting

The term "black" was not even used to describe a person of African decent until the black power movement of the 1960s. I just can't see how we're being sensitive or sparing anyone's feelings by making these changes. We're just pandering to PC culture.

[MirandaBrawnerSavannah]

Johan @bithavoc would you like to comment on this? I was trying to implement what you proposed for this repository last year. I have done the renaming and testing and the code is passing all the tests. Here is the link to my fork. I would really appreciate it if you could review it and let me know if there is anything I can do to improve it.

[shicholas]

fwiw, I think it makes sense to publicly document responseAllowList and requestAllowList and silently support responseWhitelist and requestWhitelist as aliases. I've seen this approach across many libraries making similar changes.

[NickMaev]

The problem is in your brain. Visit psychologist. Apparently you have to stay away from people even on github.

[bleek42]

The only people that think this is helping or reducing harm are largely white or white-passing liberals sitting in positions of privilege somewhere, like GitHub's corporate boardroom when they decided to change "master" to "main", or when Budweiser decided to make their cans rainbow colored. Instead of doing self-congratulatory, performative, ineffectual garbage like this, you ACTUALLY do something that matters? POC from those living in the poorest zip codes within the imperial core, to those living in the farthest reaches of the global south within the imperial periphery : I can almost GUARANTEE that this does absolutely NOTHING for them and just serves as cannon fodder for right-wing narratives about the so-called "radical, woke left-wing" so they can discredit movements for social justice... but glad the shitlibs that make these hollow gestures can feel good about themselves.

[bleek42]

A relevant thread on Y-Combinator