GitHub, fuck your name change

It’s been a self label for some time. Given the fact that there is a lot of horizontal aggression built into The System, getting everyone to pull in more or less the same direction is progress in its own right.

The terminology seems to be shifting to BIPOC, to include Indigenous peoples. I haven’t heard an a explanation for why Black is also split out.

Honest answer, generally people aren’t talking about judging people for their implicit biases, but asking them to be aware of them to prevent those biases from influencing their actions in ways they don’t intend. Those actions then may be judged, naturally.

Hopefully an example that’s not too prickly: I’m from the south of the US. I don’t have a southern accent (except when drunk or sleepy!). A lot of people, myself included, have an unconscious bias that people with southern accents are less intelligent than people without. However, I’ve known lots of smart people with southern accents, and lots of unintelligent people without them. I don’t know why I have this bias: it was instilled in me by the culture I grew up in, I guess. But, because I am aware of it, I can watch out for those reflexive feelings that make it more likely for me to dismiss something someone is saying just because of their accent. I can adjust my actions to align with the kind of unbiased person I’d like to be, even though I can’t control the lingering feelings the bias creates.

This is the general idea of wanting people to be aware of their implicit biases: not to judge them due to those biases, but to help them see that, due to societal or cultural or familial influence, they may not be living up to the kind of person they’d like to be. There’s a huge difference between someone who’s consciously racist and someone who has racist priors due to the culture they grew up in. Many in the latter group accidentally propagate racist systems, even though they would never want to do so if they had a conscious choice. But it’s hard for anyone to see how their subconscious affects their day-to-day opinions. The hope of teaching about implicit bias is that people can see its effect in their lives and make adjustments, hopefully reducing the systemic problems that people face in the process.

From David Foster Wallace’s Authority and American English essay:

> “My own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever actually changing them. Such pussyfooting has of course now achieved the status of a dialect […] I refer here to Politically Correct English (PCE), under whose conventions failing students become "high-potential” students and poor people “economically disadvantaged” and people in wheelchairs “differently abled” […] The same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution - namely, the sixties-era rejections of traditional authority and traditional inequality - have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is sort of funny in a dark way, maybe, and most criticism of PCE seems to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer’s own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but confused and dangerous. Usage is always political, of course, but it’s complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: On the one hand they can be a reflection of political change, and on the other they can be an instrument of political change. These two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them - in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language’s political symbolism - enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE’s central fallacy - that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes. […] There’s a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the U.S. status quo. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PCE progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as “low-income” or “economically disadvantaged” or “pre-prosperous” rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates on corporations. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy leads to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE functions as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.) As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as “economically disadvantaged” rather than “poor.” Were I he, in fact, I’d probably find the PCE term insulting - not just because it’s patronizing but because it’s hypocritical and self-serving. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker - scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language - and so serves the selfish interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed.“

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Look at how much crappier the thread gets below. It's everybody's responsibility not to push threads in such directions.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26490895.

Yes, this is a good summary of what these changes do. They allow white people to pat themselves on the back, without actually doing anything material to help break down racism.