Actually, black/whiteliste was one of the cases where i didn’t notice the negative connotation before, but it is obviously true. the subtle negative connotation leads to stigmatization. So i like it.
i think client/server is fine, it doesn’t have a colonial connotation.
Is this really a good way to move forward? Rename everything and pretend like it did not happen? It feels like this kind of approach is just hiding things under the carpet. Renaming things that may have negative connotations due to a troubled history is too extreme form of censorship (similar to book burning) and a bit lazy IMHO.
All these technical terms are very descriptive of the concepts they abstract, (eg. it could be argued that black/white-listing is in relation to physical light and how it reflects off white and gets absorbed by black).
Disclaimer: I am culturally very far away from the colonial history so I may be a bit biased when I say renaming things like that is just dumb.
I dont get this “pretend it didn’t happen” thing people like to push these kinds of changes as, because they are actively admitting that bad things did happen and they would like to avoid associating themselves and normalizing the idea of something as horrible as slavery and instead use objectively clearer and language and terms less rooted in historical trauma.
There exist alternatives that also are very descriptive of the concepts they abstract
the point is not to pretend it did not happen, it is to avoid the subtle negative connotation. When one has no experience with black people but works a lot in tech, the term “blacklist” will form the opinion and behavior regarding black people. This person will think it is more likely, black people do negative things like robbery, etc.
the person alice hasters who has written at length on this topic germany cites one example, where she was on a market and wanted to look at stuff to buy, but the selling person thought alice intended to rob him. So he shouted alice should go away. When alice said she was interested to buy things and even has a white person besides her to “prove” that she was not intended to rob him, he was fine with it. But he didn’t even excuse himself for this language. Such things are more likely when terms like whitelist is used for positive things and blacklist is used for negative things. Because the color black is not inherently bad, so why is a blacklist bad?
As for the anecdote in your third bullet point: instead of renaming black/white-list terms to something else, what if we actually educate that shop owner about racism and why it is idiotic and evil to discriminate against a person because of their skin color?
it doesn’t work, usually. When you go to people and call them racist, they will go defensive. Very few people actually think about this and try to find out what was racist and how they could improve. This is the experience of many marginalized groups, be it people who suffer sexism, racism, ableism, etc.
So because racism and being racist is rather severe, people usually refuse to acknowledge it, the first time. So a common response when people are confronted about a subtle racist stereotype is to say that they have a black friend or had a black girlfriend, and therefore can’t be racist. So they understand the “hey, you are here a little racist” as “hey, you’re racist, nazi”. They don’t see that racism can be subtle.
the point i’m trying to make is that racism is much more widespread than people usually believe. This is one of the thousand examples black people have to prove such things. So of course, we should work on that as a society and educate that. And one way of educating that is to provoke a public discussion about such terms as blackness/whiteness, maybe we slowly get to the point where the majority of the society listens and believes black experiences (which we currently don’t, mostly). And the other important point is to remove the subtle association of “black/dark = bad” which a blacklist has. So the idea is to especially educate further tech-generations.
I concede to your second point, and I am starting to see why black/white-list can be a sensitive term and just trying to change the connotation like I suggested somewhere above is not tractable.
I still think that education is key. Not going outright and calling people racist, that is counterproductive I wholeheartedly agree. But instilling in them from a younger age the evil of racism instead.
Actually, black/whiteliste was one of the cases where i didn’t notice the negative connotation before, but it is obviously true. the subtle negative connotation leads to stigmatization. So i like it.
i think client/server is fine, it doesn’t have a colonial connotation.
Is this really a good way to move forward? Rename everything and pretend like it did not happen? It feels like this kind of approach is just hiding things under the carpet. Renaming things that may have negative connotations due to a troubled history is too extreme form of censorship (similar to book burning) and a bit lazy IMHO.
All these technical terms are very descriptive of the concepts they abstract, (eg. it could be argued that black/white-listing is in relation to physical light and how it reflects off white and gets absorbed by black).
Disclaimer: I am culturally very far away from the colonial history so I may be a bit biased when I say renaming things like that is just dumb.
Blacklist/whitelist is objectively a less accurate term than blocklist/allowlist.
I dont get this “pretend it didn’t happen” thing people like to push these kinds of changes as, because they are actively admitting that bad things did happen and they would like to avoid associating themselves and normalizing the idea of something as horrible as slavery and instead use objectively clearer and language and terms less rooted in historical trauma.
There exist alternatives that also are very descriptive of the concepts they abstract
the point is not to pretend it did not happen, it is to avoid the subtle negative connotation. When one has no experience with black people but works a lot in tech, the term “blacklist” will form the opinion and behavior regarding black people. This person will think it is more likely, black people do negative things like robbery, etc.
the person alice hasters who has written at length on this topic germany cites one example, where she was on a market and wanted to look at stuff to buy, but the selling person thought alice intended to rob him. So he shouted alice should go away. When alice said she was interested to buy things and even has a white person besides her to “prove” that she was not intended to rob him, he was fine with it. But he didn’t even excuse himself for this language. Such things are more likely when terms like whitelist is used for positive things and blacklist is used for negative things. Because the color black is not inherently bad, so why is a blacklist bad?
I also suggest to read the draft: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html where these things are explained.
As for the anecdote in your third bullet point: instead of renaming black/white-list terms to something else, what if we actually educate that shop owner about racism and why it is idiotic and evil to discriminate against a person because of their skin color?
So because racism and being racist is rather severe, people usually refuse to acknowledge it, the first time. So a common response when people are confronted about a subtle racist stereotype is to say that they have a black friend or had a black girlfriend, and therefore can’t be racist. So they understand the “hey, you are here a little racist” as “hey, you’re racist, nazi”. They don’t see that racism can be subtle.
I concede to your second point, and I am starting to see why black/white-list can be a sensitive term and just trying to change the connotation like I suggested somewhere above is not tractable.
I still think that education is key. Not going outright and calling people racist, that is counterproductive I wholeheartedly agree. But instilling in them from a younger age the evil of racism instead.