GitHub, fuck your name change

The worst I have seen is the media's failure to cover that Google - and probably Microsoft too - blacklisted historic black universities for over a decade. This a juke, a pump fake - not something substantial.

> Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech.

Implicit bias is made to be the boogeyman when it reality, it is probably a very a small fraction of the cause of "lack of diversity" in tech, if at all. Anyone who has attended computer science courses in college anytime would know the number of black students were little to none. It has always been a pipeline problem from the education side of things. To say that typing a word that so happens to have a relation to slavery caused a "lack of diversity" in tech is the biggest farce in this industry and it is extremely sad to see this line parroted by many in the industry. I expect to be heavily downvoted and even flagged for "wrongthink" but I think it tells a lot about how irrational and unhealthy our state of discourse is in today's world.

> If something is "black and white", there's a clear right and wrong. In our language, "black" is synonymous with "wrong", and yet this word with negative connotations is used for an entire race of people.

I don't think most people think like that. Black and white in that meaning is used in very specific contexts, not in general. Nobody thinks that a "black and white film" is about moral issues. In German, "black on white" (schwarz auf weiß) refers to (usually black) ink on (usually white) paper and nobody has race on their mind when they say it. We're not wearing black at funerals "because it's wrong that somebody died". Black numbers are good ("schwarze Zahlen schreiben" = "writing black numbers" = earning money), red numbers usually aren't. Waving the white flag isn't great. Black/brown bread is delicious, and so is Schwarzbier if you're into stronger tastes in beer, and you can get black-out drunk with enough of it. There's really no association with Africans with that usage of "black".

I have a feeling that a lot of people believe that first came racism and Europeans looking down on Africans and then came "black = bad" associations in language. There was no European colonialism back then, Northern African slave raiders regularly went on slave raids to (mostly Southern) Europe etc. The use of black in that sense is, at least in German, at least 1200 years old, long before significant contact between Central Europe and Africa.

As a black man in tech, I can say its always frustrating to me when a company tells me what I should be offended by. The master word has never even crossed my mind in that way, I've always thought of it as in the music term. Its one of those settle racist things that I've noticed time and time again in tech. Its as if a bunch of white people come together to prove how "not racist" they are to their other white friends. They start to try to out do each other so much It starts to have the opposite effect and alienates people that just want to be treated normal, not like former slaves.

I think this whole freak out is just dumb.

It’s just a name. It needs an identifiable name be it Master, main, develop, hell you could call it beavis and it would mean the same thing.

Or don’t.

It just don’t matter.