28
votes
American Bar Association calls for US courts to find a different word than master, citing history and negative associations
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- Title
- US judiciary's 'master' moniker needs replacing, American Bar Association says
- Authors
- Karen Sloan, Dietrich Knauth
- Published
- Feb 13 2024
- Word count
- 434 words
The supposed connection to chattel slavery feels extremely tenuous, and ultimately performative. I can understand their second point, that "special master" implies more of a direct role, when the role is more of a mediator.
IMO, it's mostly political posturing and virtue signaling. Tech went through the same exercise a few years ago with the elimination of terms like master, whitelist/blacklist, etc that were used to describe technical properties. I'm fine to use different terms if it makes someone feel better, but I also never met anyone who actually took personal issue with those terms in the first place.
I am fairly confident that if I ever met someone who felt alienated by this kind of language that they would not have shared their feelings with me. I am not saying that this case of challenged language is correct. A different, more clear cut example where I believe it is a good idea, would be California recently removing the word Squaw from place names. Squaw is a slur and native american communities are vocal about disliking having to see it.
I don't care for the bar association's proposed replacement of 'neutral' but hearing officer or arbiter would serve the purpose along with other terms I haven't thought of.
"Lord High Archon of Deliberations" is my nomination.
I work with a pretty diverse team, which does include black people. I'm thankful that we have a company and team culture where we're able to speak openly about stuff like this. Now, I realize that my team is relatively a small sample size compared to the whole industry, but nobody cared in the slightest. We all went through the effort to rename our git branches from master to main, and change language in documentation and such because that's where the industry (and our company) wanted to go, but I just don't think we're better off for it. We're certainly not worse off, but I don't see it is any kind of accomplishment either.
I've dealt with some extremely weird bugs due to a config file being changed from a
BlackListto adeny_list, but I'll admit that was a one-off.Edit: We also got rid of blackout days cause they sounded racist, I guess? Everyone still calls them blackouts though.
I’m a little more sympathetic to the whitelist/blacklist change, because it’s actually more descriptive, and the justification for one being the positive and the other being the negative is arbitrary.
I don’t think “blackouts” fits here - blackouts are a literal description of what happens when the power goes out, everything goes black.
That said, this is the first I’ve heard of any attempts to stop using blackout.
Unfortunately I don't have any sources that I can share externally, but there are groups that have tried to ban the terms "blackout" and "brownout" claiming that they're racist. I also think it's a bit ridiculous since they're literal descriptions but here we are...
On the first one, it was reported by a couple of right wing news sites, which ignore that a complaint was made albeit a joking one.
So a chief tries to make a change based on a complaint that turns out to be a joke (allegedly at least) and keeps the change because it's already made?
The other is an anonymous post on a website I've never seen?
This is a bit like tide pods, yeah there are a handful of people who ate one because some people do stupid shit, but all of Gen Z wasn't snacking on them like candy.
Blind is a website used by tech company employees to discuss internal company issues anonymously. It's anonymous so plenty of things on there are BS, but I can personally verify that my company banned the words blackout and brownout.
Sure, I'm not saying they didn't happen. I'm saying those aren't really useful sources that really give you any idea of the frequency or the context.
And sometimes it isn't because the word is offensive, it's because certain people are jackasses. Maybe brownout isn't offensive at all, but everytime there is one a squad/team/whatever looks at their Latino colleague and says "means you gotta work eh? hey white guys are off today!"
Maybe someone was well meaning but got it wrong. That's not the end of the world either. I would just want actual data to base that all on.
The Main/Branch thing was one of the few instances of this that I actually did think was well considered. Offensiveness aside, the change was an improvement since the new names are more clear about what the relationship is and they’re not kludgy to say in conversation.
Too many of the alternatives people propose sound vague, bloodless, or like scholarly jargon. It makes the language feel artless. I’m not even really attached to the existing verbiage so if people want to change things up whatever. But the change should actually feel organic.
I'm still a bit disappointed that "main" was the name landed on. Seems bland in that corporate sort of way. My preference would've been to take a cue from SVN and gone with "trunk". It fits well with the branch metaphor and still a little quirky, what's not to love?
I liked “main” and “tributary.” Then you think of it more like a river.
I liked the master terminology. The master branch is the master copy. Then again, main likely describes the workflow of most projects. It’s a philosophical difference between “this is the master copy of the last working build” and “here is the main place programming happens”.
Yeah that makes sense in the context of there being a master that gets copied over. But I view that as a paradigm more for finished software that you pack in a box to ship. When you’re doing continuous, iterative development it feels more like a flow that has to be managed and merged than reconciliation against a master set.
I did my undergrad in Computer Engineering a few years ago and I between then and now I've known a fair number of people who didn't like the usage of the term.
That said, I think that it's also a bit more "direct" in a lot of tech. Referring to a relationship as "Master/Slave" is pretty in your face. Blacklist/whitelist may not have originally had a racial connection but that doesn't mean that it never did. And IMO allowlist/denylist is more straightforward anyway.
I also know that some people who dislike the terms don't feel safe enough to speak up about it. Tech, and law, aren't known for being super diverse. These sorts of changes are low commitment but can help make sure that everyone feels included.
I don't know about law, but I would argue that tech is one of the more diverse fields out there, even just looking at my local team. I'm happy that I get to work such a diverse team as an architect for a 70-person development team with staff across 8 countries.
Like I said, I'm fine with changing terms if it makes people feel better. But I sometimes question the outcome of initiatives like this, because I think that it can cause people and companies to pat themselves on the back with a sense of accomplishment around combating racism, when in reality, nothing really changed. People are still being heavily discriminated against during hiring and in the workplace. It's like calling yourself environmentally-conscious because you used a corn straw instead of a plastic one while flying on a private jet.
I'm wondering who thought it was a big change? I think it's true that small terminology updates like this don't move the needle much, but they're also not that hard to do and they remove an irritation for some people.
Context: technology companies often do wholesale UI redesigns that confuse people a lot more, for less reason.
For us, I wouldn't call it a "big" change equivalent to a whole UI redesign, but it was more than just updating documentation and talking differently. Particularly with our git repos, CI/CD pipelines and gitops automation, we spent a lot of time making updates to automation code to change the name of our production branches from 'master' to 'main'. We also used 'whitelist' in our Change Management system, which we changed to 'allowlist'.
For some systems, it's more complicated than what we went through. There was a discussion about this for Redis when this inclusive language issue was popular several years ago. They pointed out that there were 1500 occurrences of the term 'slave' in within the code, and that it was also included in outputs that are ingested by other systems. There are also actual commands (eg SLAVEOV) that include the term. Changing these terms, much like changing the structure of an API response, would mean breaking changes.
Ultimately, Redis decided that it wasn't worth the effort to change the terms everywhere, but to their credit, they did add a new command called REPLICAOF and SLAVEOF is deprecated.
But overall, it's often not that simple to just find-replace these terms and move on with your day. Some of these changes (like Redis) take multiple years of effort since you need to coordinate them with your users, and the overall outcome is negligible.
Yes, that does sound like a lot of work. I’m reminded of Java where deprecated API’s rarely get removed. There’s often little reason to do that anyway.
Slavery is probably the last thing I think of when I see the word Master. I have always equated Master with having expert knowledge. Or like a Masterpiece.
These renames always sound like someone ask for equality and got a pizza party in response, Like it doesn’t seem connected to real issues.
This is all so tiresome. I thought we were slowly getting past this cultural wave of renaming things.
Unfortunately no, the Euphemism Treadmill has been in high gear for the last 10 years (particularly in the USA) and shows no signs of slowing down.
I know the term, but in my experience the public opinion has started gradually shifting in the last year or two. I've seen clear criticisms of some aspects of "woke" culture not just from the alt right but in the relative mainstream. Impossible to say if it's a trend yet though.
I have no reason to stick to “master” on new projects and petulantly revert git’s default name change. However, I do think less of everyone who insisted that existing projects waste time renaming master to main.
Master/slave was the worthwhile change. Forget about offensiveness to people not in the room: master/replica and controller/worker are better specific terminology to describe separate cases that were previously both called master/slave.
All those folks with Masters degrees gotta be sweating bullets.
I've always liked Magister, personally.
Not just degrees, I'm currently studying for my master electrician certification. What am I supposed to call myself instead?
Although admittedly I am partial to being called "Thor". "Zeus" might be more thematically fitting, but I'm a lot less rapey than him, so there's that...
Channeler of the energy voltaic?
Can I propose Court Sherpa? A guide to navigate the mazes of beuracracy and mountains of precedent.
Sherpa is an actual Nepali caste. They do not like the term being used to conflate themselves solely as helpers. It’s way more problematic than Master, which is a normal English word that long predates the institution of slavery and has had many uses outside of that context.
And I was worried about that. The context I had always heard was within the context of hiring for mountaineering help, but what you say does make sense.
They have historically been accomplished mountaineers, but it’s a bit like calling someone a “Jew” because they work in finance.
I have a bit of a mountaineering background, and this one irks me. I'm not of Nepalese descent or anything, but I don't think it's offensive. It's just nonsensical, imprecise, and belies that the speaker has no idea what "Sherpa" means.
Presumably the term you've heard is "hire a Sherpa". This refers to when one is Himalayan mountaineering, to hire a local to help you. This is done because
a) for many climbs it's legally required for a permit. It helps stimulate the local economy and provides someone to keep an eye to make sure you're not doing something weird.
b) they have more knowledge of the area and route than you, and can act as a guide.
c) they can carry your stuff and are likely cheaper and stronger than anyone you could have brought with you.
Using "Sherpa" the way you have is nonsensical because it's unlikely that there are in fact any Sherpa people in any given courtroom.
It's also imprecise because in a Himalayan mountaineering context, Sherpa people act as both guides and porters as I mentioned. They're pretty different roles and it's usually not obvious what a speaker means, even if the listener also knows that by "Sherpa" you meant "hired hand for mountaineering".
I think this is where your statement should stop, and you should start doing a little reading on the matter.