There's a lot of "can you imagine [..]" going on with these things. The question is, does this actually happen? Because if it doesn't then the entire point is moot.
I've read through a lot of these kind of discussions in the last week, and one thing that really strikes me is that they consist almost entirely of white people discussing this. This seems a bit odd to me because there are plenty of non-white programmers as well (especially if you look beyond the Silicon Valley bubble). I'd like to think that these people are more than articulate enough to raise these kind of issues themselves if they want to. In general, it seems to me that black people are not so fragile that they will be scared at the first sight of the word "master", especially when it has no direct relationship to slavery (it's a common word in quite a few different contexts).
Quite frankly, the entire thing has more than a bit of a "white saviour" smell to it and comes off as rather patronising.
I suspect one reason this is happening is that many people feel powerless to change the status quo – a frustration I share – so they do stuff like this because, well, have to do something, and this is where they do have the power to influence things. Another commenter called this "virtue signaliging", but I think that's a bit ungenerous; I think by and large people are actually looking for ways to make a difference, which is great but ... it also doesn't mean you actually are making a difference. All of this strikes me as the programmer equivalent of "slacktivism".
I've read through a lot of these kind of discussions in the last week, and one thing that really strikes me is that they consist almost entirely of white people discussing this. This seems a bit odd to me because there are plenty of non-white programmers as well (especially if you look beyond the Silicon Valley bubble). I'd like to think that these people are more than articulate enough to raise these kind of issues themselves if they want to. In general, it seems to me that black people are not so fragile that they will be scared at the first sight of the word "master", especially when it has no direct relationship to slavery (it's a common word in quite a few different contexts).
Quite frankly, the entire thing has more than a bit of a "white saviour" smell to it and comes off as rather patronising.
I suspect one reason this is happening is that many people feel powerless to change the status quo – a frustration I share – so they do stuff like this because, well, have to do something, and this is where they do have the power to influence things. Another commenter called this "virtue signaliging", but I think that's a bit ungenerous; I think by and large people are actually looking for ways to make a difference, which is great but ... it also doesn't mean you actually are making a difference. All of this strikes me as the programmer equivalent of "slacktivism".