Wouldn't it be more effective to pursue criminal charges against the individuals directly responsible? Graffitis, particularly when they involve symbols as disturbing as a noose, are not just offensive, they're criminal acts. They could even be classified as hate crimes or death threats. The perpetrators should be held responsible. Otherwise, they'll simply continue this harmful behavior in their future workplaces, knowing that there are no real consequences.
- Tesla, once receiving complaints about it, not doing anything about this
The important bit:
> Tesla has failed to investigate complaints of racist conduct and has fired or otherwise retaliated against workers who reported harassment, the EEOC said in the lawsuit.
I don't really know how labor law works on this front but if Tesla knew this was happening and did nothing about it I guess they are considered partly liable for... something?
> but if Tesla knew this was happening and did nothing about it I guess they are considered partly liable for... something?
Tesla has to provide a safe work environment. Just like they have to provide employees with equipment and training to not physically hurt themselves doing their job they need to provide resolution and training to prevent employees from hurting each other.
> According to OSHA, bullying and intimidation constitute a form of workplace violence because workers do not deserve to be treated poorly or abused while trying to make a living.
Yeah, it's a civil case, not criminal. Only criminal trials should have standards as high as criminal trials do because only criminal trials punish you by taking away your personal autonomy and freedom. Civil trials cost you money, so obviously the standard is lower.
Not a lawyer but in US, First Amendment provides freedom to practice hate speech. The best way to combat hate speech, however vile they are is to let them be said in public and to shame them in public with an order of magnitude of a better alternative speech. Providing government right to pursue criminal charges for speech is a slippery slope.
I'm not sure with this case but with a previous one "California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) ... lawsuit against Tesla alleging systematic racial discrimination and harassment." it appeared they were out to get Tesla without much evidence the company was behaving particularly badly.
I mean in a plant with 30,000 employees someone's probably going to say something racist to someone else but it's a question of whether the company tries to stop it which it seemed they did. Tesla press release at the time: https://www.tesla.com/blog/dfehs-misguided-lawsuit
Most companies would opt to settle this type of thing, it's interesting that Tesla has chosen to not do that. Seems very Muskian.
It's especially curious in light of their early complaint in a separate but related action by CA in which they complained they weren't given the opportunity to settle. They said those charges were politically motivated, I would assume they'll make the same case here.
Yeah I know right? Didn't they settle for a massive amount last time?
I'll never forget the infamous 'lack of toilet paper' story that came out of Giga Nevada. It freakin came back when Musk bought Twitter: this time garbage piling up and no toilet paper at Twitter. I don't know what is it with Musk and toilet paper but it seems like all these companies have poor organizational issues.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
and also:
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho.
Even 15 years ago, when I started my professional journey (in Germany) there were a lot of people who were gay, trans and so on in the dev community … and nobody cared about it. We were all passioned about technologies and respected each other based on commitment/engagement/skill level. At the end most of the true full blood developers were always «special» and knew since their childhood that they were different from other children. I think that’s the reason why the embarrassment level was pretty low and people just wore the stuff they wanted, behaved like they wanted eg.
But of course that’s only my personal experience. I’m sure there are a lot of other stories out there to share.
As a black person, the switch from master to main, is the most condescendingly racist thing that has been widely adopted in tech. It says "black people are too stupid to understand context. We (small group of white people) must protect them against words."
Another thing it does, is that it promotes the identification of blacks as slaves when all races have been enslaved (and continue to this day).
Based on how uppity about it around the time the whites I talked to about it were, yes it was 100% this.
The high horse riding was surreal. They all took long savouring draws of their own farts after each 'master' branch they renamed to 'main'.
When I mentioned that none of the people they did this in the name of were helped, they met it with abject hostility. Narcissism is a hell of a condition.
edit:
It also reminds me of men playing feminist and stepping (aggressively) up to protect women’s rights. I heard from my female colleagues that they hate this since it implies that women are like children and aren’t able or mature enough to speak up for themselves. So the «strong men» need now to protect them…
The “white saviour” complex is well documented. Well-meaning but racist in their ignorance white people try to save people based on racist stereotypes and caricatures of imagined problems.
Hey, maybe the white dude feels icky about the master/slave thing. Maybe it's not about the opinions of black people but words we want in common usage in our societies.
Is the intent to completely remove the terms? That's a new angle I hadn't heard. I guess it makes said guilty feeling persons life easier, as they can't hear about the currently happening slavery in the world and can continue on their merry way.
The point is to correlate the word slavery with the concept of human slavery only. Disallowing a word to be used outside that usage is better for everyone.
Why should non-racist white people feel guilty over the actions of other people simply because they have the same skin colour?
I do think we need to be aware of and oppose racism, but I cannot understand this attitude. It actually seems a bit... racist, even if well intentioned.
> I’m honestly a bit shocked at the reactionary nature of this entire thread. I knew HN had a bunch of conservative and libertarian tech bros but…holy shit. This whole thread is unhinged.
I am not from the US. I am not white. I am typically in the left (to what's considered left in the countries I lived in). And I really dislike all the political correctness that seeped into tech, and generally comes from the US.
All the jargon tiptoeing is extremely condescending, as if non-white people are too moronic and/or weak-minded to understand that words have different meanings in different contexts.
And, no, thinking that does not make me reactionary and/or libertarian. The very much American behavior of pointing fingers at any minor thing and scream "Racist" will not define my political leanings.
To be clear, I’m only talking about the US. I don’t care what other countries do with their terminology. If they’re using “master/slave,” they’re already borrowing our terminology that came from an American. What’s so hard about borrowing again?
What I do know is that my Black team member is offended by master/slave terminology. Maybe their grandparents had a grandparent who was enslaved, and they don’t want to be reminded of that past every day at work. Their parents grew up in segregated schools with segregated bathrooms and water fountains. That experience is very much in living memory. It wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things.
That’s more than enough for me to not use that terminology anymore.
This isn’t about political correctness, it’s about basic respect and empathy for other people.
I would argue that the US has unique racial tensions and that racism is deeply embedded within its system. Maybe if you live in a homogeneous culture racism doesn’t become so much of a problem. Not the case in the US.
That’s probably why in your perspective Americans can’t stop bringing up racism, because it’s such a pervasive issue in our society. There aren’t many other countries that have experienced anywhere near as much demographic change via immigration as the US.
> This isn’t about political correctness, it’s about basic respect and empathy for other people.
This is what it ultimately comes down to. Unfortunately, a large segment of our population doesn't value basic respect and empathy, and we end up with this current (ridiculous) 100+ comment thread.
My buddy goes by a nickname because he was originally named after his abusive father and he'd rather not be reminded of the guy. I have two choices: 1. I could insist on calling him by his original name using excuses like "Well, that's technically your name" and "I have the free speech right to call you by that name" and "I think changing one's name is dumb" and "Why should I lift a finger" and "You can’t force me to..." and blah blah blah, or 2. I can simply respect his wishes and call him by his preferred nickname.
Option 2 doesn't cost me anything, causes zero drama, and makes everything better. It's a no-brainer. Yet vast swaths of America seem to stubbornly want to go with option 1, on this and many similar issues, resulting in unnecessary fighting, grief, drama, protests, counter-protests, pain, suffering... all because they lack empathy.
I agree with the most part of what you wrote and I don't want to turn this even more into an unconstructive flame war than it already is.
I just wanted to reply on the following point:
> I knew HN had a bunch of conservative and libertarian tech bros but…holy shit. This whole thread is unhinged.
Many people on that thread seem to not be american so thinking of them through a US political lens may not be pertinent - the politically-loaded, US-centric, source of the change may also be the source of the frustration with it in the first place (see the bottom of this reply).
Just on this point, I consider myself left-leaning (and from what I can see, US democrats would mostly be at the center - and Biden center-right - of the political spectrum in my country), yet I share the point of view of the other commenters regarding the "master" change and the ways it is pushed.
> In what universe is master/slave not racist
For the "master" part at least, I would say most people do not link it to slavery because most people are not from an english-speaking country.
For me, when I read master I may just think about master recordings. That does not mean that it may or may not have a racism-linked origin (I have no idea about that) but understand that many people around the world don't do the connection. Then, as it is mostly US people that push for other to change that name vehemently, this make many people think that those are americans that want to push their current political ideology down someone else's throat (which has a completely different cultural and political background) and may elicit a strong response.
I’m speaking purely from the context of the US, and I wouldn’t want to shove our terminology down anyone else’s throat. That said, the US does drive a lot of software culture since it’s the industry epicenter, so I guess it’s unavoidable at some point.
Maybe I could have used less politically-charged language, but in my eyes it was necessary to surface the connection. I think that in the US, a very specific political group rallies around opposition to social justice, and that group has a tendency to try and hide their underlying motivations (e.g., using dogwhistling).
> I think that in the US, a very specific political group rallies around opposition to social justice, and that group has a tendency to try and hide their underlying motivations (e.g., using dogwhistling).
Talk about dog whistling! Why don’t you actually say what you mean: “I think people who disagree with my beliefs are unworthy and their opinions don’t count.”
You’re basically headed straight to the tolerance paradox.
If you disagree with my desire to not harm others, the inverse is that you want to harm others. No, that opinion doesn’t count, and is unworthy. My intolerance of that opinion is not hypocrisy.
This has nothing to do with the tolerance paradox.
The comment tried to smear opponents of the social justice movement as dog-whistling bigots. But the social justice movement is not, in many people’s very legitimate opinions, the right way to achieve fairness. It also doesn’t enjoy the kind of broad consensus its proponents like to pretend they have.
It’s not literal guilt like in a criminal trial, it’s a collective responsibility.
“White guilt is a belief that white people bear a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other racial groups” (Wikipedia)
Here’s an analogy: if I see litter on the ground in my neighborhood, I’m not guilty of littering. But if I willfully ignore it and downplay it, rather than putting in extra effort to pick it up, my neighborhood will still have litter.
On your litter analogy: I might be taking advantage of policies that have trash pickup on my street but don’t pickup trash on the other side of the tracks for “reasons”
> I’m honestly a bit shocked at the reactionary nature of this entire thread. I knew HN had a bunch of conservative and libertarian tech bros but…holy shit. This whole thread is unhinged.
It's shocking indeed. I'm not sure "reactionary" is a fitting description. Refusing even to extend the faintest hints of common courtesy while being fully aware of the racist and bigoted connotations of using certain terms is something that even goes beyond basic manners.
All the downvoted being dumped on messages that point out this fact is even more concerning. These are basic principles of living in a civilized society. Is that out of fashion?
you see, this is the gift of American progressive cultural imperialism.
Suddenly, the only historiography that can exist in the world is that of American trustafarians who try to minimize their shame of being born wealthy heirs of the slave-owner class by spreading the shame on white immigrants that arrived way after slavery got disbanded.
And once you set the precedence that you can at will shame innocent people - the majority of white Americans - into obedience even though it’s technically impossible that their ancestors had anything to do with slavery… well then why stop at Americans at all?
Now its every European country and culture that has to subvert itself to the viewpoint of Ivy league grads.
Brownfacing, Blackfacing, minstrelshows, Kuklux you name it - it doesn’t matter what Poles could possibly have to do with it, or Germans or Swedes - you are all guilty by being born white.
I'd say at least some Europeans have their own guilt to deal with, if we're saying the sins of the parents should be visited on the children... Not like the US has a monopoly on terrible history
> if we're saying the sins of the parents should be visited on the children
I’d say this is the binary option we routinely fail to make the right choice.
> renaming master branches/HDDs to main because of rAciSm
Sticking to OP‘s topic its just ridiculous to have such a discussion in Europe because we are supposedly to feel guilty about what other people did to African Americans.
Lest for the majority of US slaves well into the 1700s were European catholics, or that much of European borders and coasts were routinely raided in the hunt for white slaves (Cornwall, Ireland, Russia…)
As a Brit at least, the empire was doing very well out of the slave trade at some point even if there were no slaves in UK (which iirc there were some depending how the law on bringing bringing in slaves stood at the point), so I don't think we can disclaim responsibility like that. Whether we should feel personally guilty for something that happened before anyone now living was born is a different issue, but I think we should acknowledge it happened
As a brit I didn't know cornwall + ireland were raided for slaves into the 1700s (earlier, with viking Circa 1000 yes, but not after). Could you provide some solid links please? TIA
I work with SPI devices a bit, and _some_ places have shifted from MISO/MOSI (Master in Slave out etc) to CIPO/COPI. Or PICO/POCI (Pico? Like the really cheap and popular RPi device?). MISO/MOSI is at least consistent, unambiguous, and is _literally a master/slave situation_. Unless the end game is to remove the words master and slave from the dictionary in case someone gets offended, this is stupid.
Whats new is that people now base their identity around it and expect some kind of validation to happen. Do a mental scenario where people did that not with gender identity, but with their heritage or national identity.
I can understand the master/slave thing as it does directly come from "slavery" so although I think it's stupid to change git I can see it being an issue. Not being from the US I never realized why the large bedroom in a house was called the master bedroom.
Changing blacklist and whitelist to allowlist and denylist is however stupid.
Notice that “master” in the context of git has nothing to do with slavery. Master means the “reference” like “master” copy for CDs / Records that duplicates are made from.
Etymologicaly master comes from magister that also means expert / teacher. This is more apparent in some Latin languages like Spanish (I’m Spanish) where we have words like Maestro meaning teacher.
In Spanish Master copy translates to “Copia Maestra”. Nothing to do with slavery.
Most progressives in the US don’t know anything about this and / or conveniently ignore it.
> The «master» to «main» change was totally unnecessary and B.S. imho.
If I recall correctly, the point of reflecting upon the usage of specific terms was not that every single person thought it was B.S. but that a minority might feel negatively impacted by them, and it took no trouble at all to accommodate them by switching to less charged terms.
Basically it's the same argument behind not swearing at the workspace.
Were you negatively impacted by replacing references to "master/slave" or "blacklist" with terms like "primary/secondary" or "allowlist"? I hear a lot of people whining about these but I'm yet to hear any coherent argument against it.
It's also telling that this dead horse is being flogged in a discussion on the US Federal Government looking into recurring accusations of racial bigotry.
> But that's not even what "master" means in git. There is no "slave" branch.
I think you're trying to cherry-picking debatable examples as strawmen. The central argument was not that some inclusive terms may or may not extend to all applications. The central argument being made in this thread by anti-inclusiveness proponents is that each and every single proposal to use terms that are not racist or bigoted should be rejected, regardless of their suitability.
In addition, I don't see anyone even try to argue that "master" branch is suited of even makes sense, while alternative terms such as "mainline", "development", "production", or even "release" are extensively used.
Sorry, but it's obvious that you are. This discussion is not about Git but about Tesla's history of harassment, racism, and overall bigotry, and the thread you're commenting on is clearly about the usage of inclusive language instead of legacy non-inclusive terms. I feel you're playing dumb and disingenuous to pretend it's suddenly about Git, which is really not cool or contributing positively to the discussion.
Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia.
Consider the QWERTY keyboard, which is far from the most efficient design. JavaScript is notorious for its quirks. Unix commands often lack intuitiveness, suffering from poor naming conventions. Linux is coded in a language that has memory safety issues. Even the English language itself, is riddled with inconsistencies and arbitrary exceptions. The list goes on.
To surmount the inertia for any of the mentioned examples, the replacement solution has better be significantly superior. A marginal improvement simply won't suffice, given the large costs of change.
To many people, the switch from "master" to "main" had benefits that were, at best, debatable, while introducing substantial costs such as fragmentation, outdated tutorials and scripts, and confusion for beginners, among others. That's what got people worked up.
> Inertia is not merely caused by a psychological block, overcoming it carries real tangible costs. There are countless examples where technically superior solutions exist, but the benefits they offer do not outweigh the cost of overcoming inertia.
What colossal cost do you see in granting users the choice of, say, picking their default branch name instead of being forced to use "master"?
What cost do you see in referring to "blacklists" as "allowlist" instead?
Have you ever noticed that critical projects like Kubernetes managed to adopt clear and unambiguous concepts such as "control plane node" and "worker node" without making dubious remarks regarding "inertia"?
Any argument regarding "inertia" frankly sounds like a lame excuse to stick with bigoted and racially-charged terms without any valid reason other than a refusal to extend the most basic of common courtesies.
The costs were moderate, not colossal. But they were still bigger than the benefits, which were tiny to non-existant. Because 99.99% of people do not actually see a "master branch" as a racially-charged or bigoted term.
In the case of Kubernetes, I suppose those terms were chosen from the beginning so there was no cost of switching. And hence why no one complained about it.
Which incidentally supports my claim: that people were upset about the cost of changing rather than because of their secret admiration for slavery.
Care to point out any concrete example? Just pick the absolute best example you can imagine. So far none was provided. There's all this talk about "cost" but apparently it's so costly that even providing a concrete example is prohibitively expensive.
> In the case of Kubernetes, I suppose those terms were chosen from the beginning so there was no cost of switching. And hence why no one complained about it.
What's there to complain? Absolutely nothing at all.
But I did provide some examples in my original comment: "fragmentation, outdated tutorials and scripts, and confusion for beginners".
> What's there to complain? Absolutely nothing at all.
Well yes, that's my point. We agree on that. In the case of git, I am sure if "main" had always been the convention there would have been nothing to complain about as well. In fact, I am sure the same people who complained about the change from "master" to "main" would have complained about a change from "main" to "master".
This is such a silly argument. Let’s call it “m” then - it’s even easier to type, so should be an even bigger win, right? Thousands of scripts and workflows be damned.
Less silly than you might think. An important part of life is letting people you don't like make the world better. The people behind this change are the up-in-others-business personalities. They're always going to be destructive, but we should appreciate when they do a little good nevertheless.
I really try hard not to mock people on HN, but you need to take a look in the mirror. Your sheltered world view of what "makes the world better" isn't reflective of everyone elses, nor objectively true. I'm glad you think it's good, but you must understand that those who don't agree aren't generally 'bigoted racists' or even people who "don't like" those making the changes.
Literally everyone who renamed their master branch to main thought it was good, that is why they did it. There isn't some international police force conspiring to strong-arm unwilling coders into renaming their default git branch.
Except its a very common adjective, so any time you refer to it you have to say 'main branch' otherwise you've introduced unnecessary ambiguity. Whereas 'master' refers to one thing and one thing only in most contexts (unless you're selling bedrooms).
> Replacing one well known default with another non-retroactively increases cognitive load.
It's quite clear that managing cognitive loads is the least of all concerns considered by proponents of sticking with non-inclusive terms.
For example, the terms "blacklist"/"whitelist" do not impose a lower cognitive load than "denylist"/"allowlist", but somehow this argument is used in favour of sticking with the legacy/non-descriptive terms.
Also, there is no objective meaning to "slave". In the times of old, people talked about "slave drives" and I bet that most of the proponents of sticking with racist/bigoted language cannot even describe what it's supposed to be.
Yeah I dont think germany is a good example of mutual respect. Far from it actually. Racism and discrimination are rampant in that country, including in tech. Any german moralising americans on racism should first look at their own 10x issues.
Because it’s not in the german media. Censorship ensures the image is clean but in reality germany is at an extreme that makes the us shine. Perhaps not shootings but other types of discrimination.
HN should use ChatGPT to evaluate if a comment is mostly irrelevant to the actual article. To save costs, apply this only to comments that have a lot of engagement such as the GP.
That would be a horrible idea. There are very interesting and educational tangents found in the comment section on many submissions. Would you like all those removed from the discourse?
There's a phase of progress and real social changes, laws get passed to correct past issues, the media warms up a lot towards minorities etc. Then comes the reaction, as too much visible change happens, opposing groups organize and try to re-anchor their position, will push as hard a possible to undo some of the progress and carve out areas where they'll be able to protect their values.
I don't think that back and forth can be stopped. Fundamentally change, even regarding racism, will provoke reactions. The best we can do is ratchet as much progress as we can if we want things to move in the right direction.
IMO the newest wave of racism stems from the blowback to racist policies like affirmative action and similar. (for example, stipends only gor certain races and such)
But then affirmative action came in reaction to racist policies as well.
That fits my point: there will be cycles of reaction to reactions. If the next move to replace affirmative action has a visible impact on whitish people admission for whatever reason, there will be a reaction. If the next nation wide policies have a deep impact on religious parts of the country, it won't just past and stay that way, etc.
We are talking about a % of a minority position since only ~38% of Americans have a bachelors degree or higher. How many people really care about this issue given that majority of people in the country don't even have/did not pursue a degree from one of these institutions that had affirmative action policies.
There is only so much people can care about in their day to day. This mentality you are displaying ignores reality and will end up biting you one day when something you expect to happen does not come true because you're living your life on the internet too much.
I suppose it follows the pattern of nationality names, and more general ethnic or geographical groups, like "Japanese", or "American", or "African"'. Please note that not all Africans have black skin (look at Egypt or Libya), and not all people with black skin are Africans (see India, Micronesia, Philippines, etc). So, to my mind, "Black" with a capital B is not people with black skin. They are by far not all black-skinned people, but a particular geographic and cultural unity, the ancestors of Africans that were brought to the US, enslaved, freed, discriminated against, etc. I won't think that e.g. modem Nigerians, who likely share a lot of distant ancestry with the US Blacks, would find much cultural common ground with them (on top of the fact that Nigeria is highly culturally diverse internally).
So, if you wanted a capital W whites, that likely would be WASPs, also a specific cultural and geographical unity of white-skinned people, but by far not all white people.
What does it mean to be 'African', then? Or 'Asian'? Its the same kind of racist shit, literally separating people based on some random property.
I know the US is the world leader in backwards decisions that ignore history (while virtue signalling harder than ever before), and then being as racist as possible ("but in a good way!!!!"), but this is just sad now.
If I speak to someone, I don't ask "Are you black? Are you a woman? Were your ancestors oppressed (particularly in the west, anything else doesnt matter, see past enslavement of slavic people)?". If it matters so much to you what race someone is, or what ancestry they have, that is not a healthy way to treat people. It's the same thing as racism, its literally, by definition, the same thing.
There is a reason people in a lot of countries like Germany fight for everyone to stop using "Black" to describe someone, and instead refer to them as an individual like they are. History will repeat itself if you keep separating people based on their ethnicity
If you keep posting ideological battle/flamewar comments to HN, we're going to have to ban you. Regardless of which ideology you're for or against, it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
The criticism is that putting people in buckets based on their DNA and ancestry is what racists do and not something that we should encourage and normalize in 2023. We should minimize the importance of ethnicity and race, not emphasize it. As a staunch individualist and someone who fervently opposes racism, it's disheartening to observe the USA trending in such a direction.
No. Treating them worse based on which bucket you put them in is racist. Taking about various segments of population, what specific issues they experience and why is not that.
Thats not what "racism" is. While its one way to define racism, the most general and eay to understand one is
racism:
> The belief that each race has distinct and intrinsic attributes.
And that is what you're doing. Its not about oppression or discrimination, its about the (wrong) belief that each race has some intrinsic properties. When you start with this, you eventually end up putting people of different races on a pedestal, which does inadvertently discriminate against another race.
Hand wringing about "placing people in buckets" is one the last things we need to worry about when it comes to dealing with racism and it's effect on victims of racism. Like, "now we are colourblind, hooray! racism is finished!" While ignoring how disadvantaged people who suffered discrimination in the past (and still do) continue to feel the effects of institutionalised racism, regardless of any changes in law.
I know your intentions are noble but the alternative approach promotes the idea that racial groups are very real and matter. It promotes the belief that one "belongs" to a race, that members of a race have a shared interest, etc. It's a mindset that often leads to racism.
I grew up in a place where colorblindness was the prevalent philosophy and somehow, racism was much less of a problem than what I've witnessed in the USA. People of different colors mixed up and race or skin color was almost never mentioned. I don't think I even had a concept of what racism was until high school when it was taught in class. I can't help but have a suspicion that people who are so incredulous at the idea of "colorblindness" are simply projecting their own racist beliefs (e.g. "I am not colorblind... how could anyone be?").
Finally, I have no issue with compensating people that were direct victims of institutionalized racism. However, I take issue with the idea of assigning benefits or penalties based on factors beyond an individual's control, such as one's ancestors' or genetic makeup. If the idea is to help less fortunate people, we should develop programs that help less fortunate people, regardless of their genetics or ancestry.
Noticing that someone is a member of a racial (or any other group) is benign. It is just a fact, nothing more. What you do with that information is what matters. As an individual, I can claim that I am colour/gender/whatever-blind but _in the world that exists_, that is just ignoring what certain groups of people are experiencing from other people who are not as agnostic to these characteristics as you claim to be.
Also, I doubt that there is any place on earth that is colourblind and somehow race is not a problem. And no, "nobody speaks about it =/= the problem does not exist. Most countries have some issues with race, are largely homogeneous (sometimes despite spending decades brutally exploiting countries with other races a century or two ago), or have a long-running kerfuffle with some local minority.
> So, if you wanted a capital W whites, that likely would be ... a specific cultural and geographical unity of white-skinned people, but by far not all white people.
Thing is, white immigrants' national identities were largely, um, white-washed in the late-19th thru mid-20th c., as part of Progressive ideals that back then were quite racially slanted, and included such things as eugenics. German immigrants were especially affected by this for obvious reasons, but not only. So the argument for capital-W 'White' is hardly any weaker than for capital-B 'Black'.
Well, it would be consistent to use 'Black' for black Americans, and 'black' for black people in general, and likewise 'White' for white Americans, and 'white' for white people in general.
But then articles should use, based on context, both 'Black' and 'White', or both 'black' and 'white', while rarely it makes sense to use 'Black' and 'white' in one article, but that is the pattern used by newspapers.
> I suppose it follows the pattern of nationality names
why not Ask HN, there are black people here. what's interesting to me is that your interpretation prioritizes things that aren't really factors, and some child comments are already trying to mold that into their unworkable world view.
the only person triggered is the top level comment and thats the non sequitur on its own.
Black and black are equally benign adjectives and interchangeable, it doesn't need to be rationalized. the absence of capitalized white is an editorial choice, be the change you want to see?
"There is debate about the capitalisation of black, with some using it as a physical descriptor, others to describe a specific cultural group, therefore while generally lower case, if a subject, writer or editor of a story prefers to use Black then that choice should be respected."
Like most things in the world, black and Black is not so black and white. There's a reason some people prefer to self-identify as capital B Black. Maybe look it up before dismissing it entirely.
>> 'A good reason to capitalize the racial designation “black,” then, is precisely that black, in this sense, is not a natural category but a social one—a collective identity—with a particular history. (“Race is psychology, not biology” is a formulation Du Bois once offered.) What’s more, the very label “black” plays a role in generating that identity.'
I identify as a lot of things before I ever consider the pigment in my skin ("white as the driven snow,") but that's easy for me because it's the one thing about me that's never been under attack. I also really prefer not to associate myself with most people who make a huge deal about being capital W White.
My various European lineages (and Cherokee) crushed under it are more interesting to me, and genealogical records for them are much easier to find than it often is for people who go with Black. Sometimes Black is all people have. I can trace most of the components of my particular white back thousands of years to specific people in specific villages. There's history in our histories that informs the way we identify.
If you think about it "main" is a discriminatory term as well because it may imply a kind of patriarchal hierarchy so perhaps in the future we should have another contest or just rename it to a random string(making sure the seed is truly random).
Are you trolling? If not, could you explain how "main" specifically implies a patriarchal hierarchy? It may imply a hierarchy, but I have no idea where "patriarchal" comes from.
Capitalizing the "B" in "Black" is not some kind of reverse racism or a ploy to elevate one race above another. This is fundamentally about granting a basic level of recognition and respect to a community that has been uniquely disenfranchised. Their identity and history were forcibly taken from them due to the slave trade. They can't point to a specific nationality like "Japanese," "German," or "British" with a capital letter to highlight their roots, so the capital "B" serves as a symbolic nod to that lost heritage.
I don’t think you’re being totally honest about the double standard of this. Imagine that some people (with benign intentions) wanted to capitalize White to claim a cultural identity. After all, most whites in the US have lost the distinct European identities their ancestors had. Do you think this movement would be met with acceptance and support?
I think these kinds of double standards are what make the culture wars so inflammatory.
> Imagine that some people (with benign intentions) wanted to capitalize White to claim a cultural identity. After all, most whites in the US have lost the distinct European identities their ancestors had. Do you think this movement would be met with acceptance and support?
"Acceptance and support" is subjective, but this is a fairly common orthographic style which has been discussed at length.
Wasn’t able to read the article because of the paywall. Is this an example of a media outlet also capitalizing “white”? If so, that does weigh against my claim of a double standard.
The black man is a shadow being or dipped in paint. The Black man is ethnically sub-Saharan. The white man is a ghost. The White man is ethnically European.
Blacks are the most eager to capitalize the B in Black. Are you calling them racist?
I was really confused when I read this comment. Because to my recollection, capitalizing Black was something that went back as far as the civil rights movement. I think I remember it being a thing that Malcolm X emphasized as a matter of getting all people who had black skin and were oppressed, to identify with a common racial and cultural heritage. At the time there was a dichotomy between Malcom X and MLK Jr. because MLK was okay with the word negro and Malcolm X wanted that to fall out of use.
So wait that is offensive/wrongthink now? What is the rationale? Or am I misremembering the history? Happy to be corrected if so.
This is a big part of my issue with whatever Internet race/gender/identity outrage is dujour, people will go straight for the throat and start accusing each other of being literal Nazis over essentially semantics that are going to change every generation anyawy. I'm all for civil rights and equality under the law and happily show up to actual protests over those things, but I think a lot of this semantic stuff is cared about mostly by people who went to a fancy college and are trying to virtue signal.
Notable that this comment was silently downvoted because I guess, y'know, history, books, Black thinkers and the actual civil rights movement are apparently unpopular with the intellectuals here who just want to scream "Racism is bad" as loud as they can on the Internet and assume that will fix all problems
FWIW, French, Spanish and Italian (and probably most languages as a matter of fact) do not capitalize nationalities, religions, languages or skin colors. It's indeed arbitrary and unnecessary.
It may be meaningless to you. But it's not meaningless to other people.
Now you can choose not to care about their opinion and be dismissive of their integrity by claiming it's only for social status. But you're never going to hire the best engineers if that's the approach you take.
I've worked with some of the very best in the industry and never seen anyone do great things by being intolerant of people.
If you try to bend over backwards to appease the whims of every group of people you'll never accomplish anything. A good engineer realizes this, and prioritizes accordingly. It's a core competency of the job.
Not pushing back on master -> main is a sign that an engineer will not make good decisions on the job.
Also this has nothing to do with "intolerance" and your framing of it this way is a classic manipulation tactic: "You wouldn't want to be intolerant would you?"
It's just writing a shorter word. Why does it bug you so much. Unless you want to make bigger changes to society to counter the effects of racism instead? Cause we'd like that.
There's already plenty of affirmative action being taken. We have black history month everywhere now, minorities are getting much better representation in the media. Please don't pretend nothing positive is happening and we have to change master to main at all cost or all hope is lost. Also, this is predominantly American problem but it's shoved down our throats here in Europe like our "wealth" was built on the back of slaves.
I'm Polish, can you imagine how ridiculous this is becoming from our perspective?
You don't speak for everyone in the technology industry.
And you don't get to choose what everyone will or should do. Therefore you really need to be tolerant of people's different versions of "truth" and assume that they are acting in good faith.
Its not a trivial change, git actually doesn't have an default branch, it is actually just the remote HEAD. And its not possible to git push that information. Thats also why all the manuals about changing the "default branch" require setting some select box in the WebUI.
I do maintain a git mirror chain with several pulls/pushes in a row and the whole master/main thing has been a pain in the ass. And both sides in that debate implicitly made that wrong assumption that a "default branch" even exists, which bites me even more.
That's not even the worse part. The refusal to make a change that costs you nothing in order to stick it to people you don't like is much worse and indicates all sorts of behaviors you do not want on your team.
I was mentally and physically abused as a child by my stepfather.
If, in the middle of him choking me unconscious someone had given me the choice between "lots of people tell him he's horrible" and "someone gets him off of me", which do you think I would choose?
Do you think those who are disadvantaged due to their race would rather you worry about helping them get on their feet or not hiring someone for not wanting to name a branch "main".
You add to the hurt of this world in the name of victims who would rather you do something more useful. This is about you, not about them.
> You add to the hurt of this world in the name of victims who would rather you do something more useful.
Wrong. Maybe try talking to people that don't want that kind of verbiage instead of making bad assumptions. Removing terminology associated with slavery has high support among those that actually were descendants of slaves.
Am I hire-able? I aint white, so presumably you SHOULD hire me to help with racism. yet I rename my main branch to master on all personal projects.
So the question becomes, do the above posters hire me or not? Presumably no since I have the wrong opinion but if they refuse to hire me they're furthering racial inequities so then presumably yes.
Of course, this paradox goes away the second you acknowledge both are stupid reasons to hire or fire anyone.
---
Here's the real problem with the other posters.
A complete and utter lack of respect for the effects of their decisions on the lives of other people.
It's why I'm such a fan of the following C.S Lewis quote
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously in this thread—way over the line at which we ban an account.
Moreover, it looks like you've been primarily using HN for flamewar and ideological battle. That's another line at which we ban accounts, regardless of which ideology they're for.
Moreover, we've had to warn you about breaking the site guidelines multiple times in the past.
Normally I wouldn't ban an account without giving someone another warning first, but the sheer nastiness of how you behaved in this thread is so awful that it actually takes my breath away. You simply can't treat other people like that here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Therefore, I've banned this account, at least for now. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> It's disgusting how you try to play that card while having none of the life experiences.
sigh
I have 18 aunts and uncles, all but 1 of them was beaten and raped in a boarding school growing up. My mother was sent to that school at the age of 5, she married at 16 because it was the only way to get out of that school legally. If they were caught speaking anything but English they would be locked out of the dorms during the night, especially if it was winter. They used to force everyone into the shower and make them soap up to be as white as possible. They would be inspected and if they weren't white enough they would get beaten with a strap while in the shower.
I grew up hearing these stories.
Then one day in 9th grade I came home from school to my mother crying and she started talking about things that happened to her at that school. Things we _didn't_ grow up hearing. I won't repeat them here. I started crying because even at that age I had the wisdom to understand she was hurting and I couldn't help her.
The boarding school where my mother went doesn't exist anymore. The school shut down, the buildings were pulled down, and speaking with people who have attempted to document what happened there, it's apparently _extremely_ hard to find any records of it outside of the people who went to school there.
Do you know several of the people who ran that school later got a humanitarian award? I remember it like it was yesterday, it was announced a few days before our family reunion. The anger was _palpable_ across the entire family.
I've seen interviews with others who have gone to these boarding schools so I've seen and heard even more stories. One of a student who was accidentally beaten to death and just disappeared but everyone knew what had happened. A girl who would be pulled out of the lunch line and taken into a room with a priest who would make her pleasure him (girl, not young adult) and give her a penny afterward. She apparently became a prostitute.
Did you know _many_ of my race have black ancestry mixed in? Do you know why? Partially because _they were enslaved together_. Did you know blacks and women both technically got the right to vote before my race did because they got citizenship before my race did?
That's not even going into my own personal experiences, but FYI, I've been called the N-word before.
----
Now for the real question.
Are you a terrible human being for making me relive my own life experiences because you denied them, or are you an amazing human being for not believing a minority could ever possibly think renaming master to main was pointless.
Or maybe you can go to sleep tonight confident in two truths.
1. If you don't announce you're black immediately then you aint black, and
2. If you don't vote for Donald Trump, you aint black.
Or who knows, maybe I just made it all up.
and let me end with another CS Lewis quote.
> Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. _But I reject slavery_ because I see no men fit to be masters
It really is not about that. The problem is that some people feel the need to bend over backwards, making symbolic gestures that do not change the underlying issue. As if renaming 'whitelist' to 'allowlist' is going to turn any neo-nazis into angels.
> As if renaming 'whitelist' to 'allowlist' is going to turn any neo-nazis into angels.
As if that's the point?
What do you think a hostile workplace is? Do you think being consistently subjected to verbiage that negatively impacts your mental health is a good thing?
Seems odd to me that so many people want to hold onto things that hurt other people and justify it by saying it doesn't solve anything despite the fact that those people are telling you that it will help them.
I don’t think the idea is to convert neo-nazis. People feel pretty powerless to help fight racism and doing small things like this help them feel a bit better.
Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.
> Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.
That isn't what they say at all. The only way that argument holds any water is with profound ignorance.
It's the same line of thinking as saying that "red team" is offensive because "red" used to be a derogatory term for native Americans. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816
For the same reason black card is considered exclusive and prestigious.
Maybe you are the problem, associating everything with race and in if in your mind black is inferior, then everything using black as an adjective would be negative for you.
It does cost something, quite a lot actually, my company (correctly) refused to bow to the pressure to migrate because it would have been too expensive to update our tooling.
And acquiescing meekly to absurd demands is a much worse behavior for a team.
Even worse behavior in a teammate would be trying to browbeat their coworkers into wasting energy on performative nonsense to score social status points.
In a just world anyone who suggested this would be fired immediately.
Does that shift not regularly annoy other people? I work on several projects throughout the week and not all had their primary branch moved from master to main. I end up getting the branch name wrong a few times a week when context switching..
Is there a better solution than updating some of the older projects and automation?
Not diving into the debate about whether this is a useful change, but I do want to push back on the notion that this "costs you nothing." It costs effort, which means it costs billable hours, and therefore money. The question is if that spend pays dividends.
It also creates downstream impacts. Reddit famously had a major outage caused by this; my team had all of our builds break because a transitive dependency changed methods from "blacklist" to "allowlist".
I like the change from "master" to "main" and a lot of other changes of our times. And I have found it very often says something about a person when they dig in their heels and make a lot of noise about it. Many words are too often used trivially and inappropriately, often when they're not even technically correct (the relationship is very often better described as "controller" and "worker," for example).
This is a moment when one of the big projects is to recognize and address bad habits that have been carried forward. And I especially like the opportunity to find more appropriate and considerate words. Yes, it is sometimes merely a nod. If that is a conceptual monument of our times, that makes some texts look inconsiderate and dated, I'm good with it.
