Skip to content

race

Jump to bottom
Christopher P. Brown edited this page Jun 12, 2020 · 3 revisions

  • Racism: (One definition of) racism refers to a system of laws and processes that grow out of racial prejudice and discrimination. By this definition, white people cannot be racist because while they can experience prejudice and discrimination, they still live in a society and culture designed to benefit their race.

  • White supremacy: Like racism, another term that really needs to be separated from the idea that only bad people are white supremacists and that all white supremacists are bad people. In truth, white supremacy describes creating systems that benefit white people, and so the USA was founded on, and continues to operate on, white supremacy.

  • False binary: There is a false belief that only bad people are racist and that good people cannot be racist. This is not true, and good (white) people constantly display racist behaviors by virtue of living in a racist society.

  • White fragility: when white people respond to the mention of race with anger, withdrawal, etc. Or when they absolve themselves of race.

  • Colorblindness: when somebody says that race doesn't matter to them, or that they are "colorblind." Such a statement is racist because it denies the fact that race and racism exist, and that black people and other people of color suffer and die from it, and denies their experience.

  • White tears: a display of emotion at some depiction of racism that is problematic because the emotion itself is a kind of white privilege that people of color don't have the luxury of, and because the display turns attention and focus from the issue at hand and back to the white person.

Racism and Oppressive Language in Software Development

There is a lot of metaphor embedded in software development [1]. One of those metaphors is white supremacy (blacklist vs. whitelist) and slavery (master / slave relationships).

In a memo titled "Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language" [2] The ietf recommends replacing "blacklist / whitelist" with "block list / allow list". This is anti-racist, and also has the additional benefit of saying what it actually is.

They also recommend replacing references to "master / slave" with "primary / secondary."

Git by default initializes with a "master" branch. The reference to HEAD is hardcoded to "refs/heads/master" [3].

Luckily you can use a git template directory to change this behavior: https://github.com/chrisman/kill-your-masters

They also

1: https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/05/08/metaphors-in-man-pages/ 2: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html 3: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/builtin/init-db.c#L268

Clone this wiki locally