the whole switch from master to main was absolutely idiotic. Especially because it was a way for corporations to appear buddy buddy with disenfranchised people while doing nothing meaningful for them. Case in point, microsoft whom owns GitHub having zero issues with helping Israel commit genocide while pretending to care about black lives. Everyone is happy to be "woke" and "diverse" as long as it doesn't interfere with making a profit.
Exactly, this was by far the worst part of it. Corporate lip service to social change, and all the people who apparently are spending large parts of their lives and energy campaigning for social change just ate it up as if it was real social change. It wasn't, it did nothing except for muddy the waters and anger potential allies.
So what can a corporation do today to promote social change that isn't lip service that won't get attacked as woke? The backlash against these linguistic change efforts is spending proportional amounts of pointless energy attacking them rather than investing in more concrete outcomes themselves. I mean really keep using master branches if you want and push for things you think actually help rather than upping the engagement/outrage on something that you can easily ignore.
A corporation can donate to charities/provide grants/implement policies that help people based on their actual circumstance rather than their membership of some arbitrary group.
For example:
Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted). Such initiatives will by definition disproportionately help disproportionately disadvantaged demographics without codifying systemic racism/sexism/etc. The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures.
Similarly when providing scholarships, don't limit them to certain ethnicities. Doing so tends to mostly favor the members of the given ethnic group who are already well off. Instead make the scholarship inversely proportional to household income and select applicants randomly weighted by 1/income without regard to skin color.
Build community centers and libraries in poor communities regardless of who lives there. Give money to the ACLU and other organizations that help victims of abuse rather than tweeting a rainbow flag in June while simultaneously organizing an industry event in Saudi Arabia.
> The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures.
And above all, without incurring any actual monetary costs. (Unprompted raises??? Muahahahahaa!)
> Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted)
I mean, if anything the whole thing caused far more harm than keeping a branch name that maybe could but didn't really have a loose relation to the concept of slavery (there are many other senses of the word 'master' with nothing to do with slavery that the git branch name would make sense to mean), in the division and debate that the whole thing caused. Didn't really help anybody, just caused problems...
