My changing my tech terminology isn't going to fix systemic racial tensions. It's not going to fix white officers getting away with killing unarmed black civilians. It's not going to fix the mass incarceration of black males due to broken public policy over the last few decades. It's not going to fix systemic policy issues that lead to a higher chance of poverty for minorities, preventing class mobility.
Pick the right fight. How many man hours have we all wasted on this discussion already?
My time is valuable. Through my dollars earned I contribute to positive social change wherever possible. What's your contribution besides berating me?
If it's any consolation, a lot of my peers, myself included, share this view. I wouldn't bother taking any of your valuable time responding to people who refuse to acknowledge your points.
> My time is valuable. Through my dollars earned I contribute to positive social change wherever possible. What's your contribution besides berating me?
Dunno. But that antirez guy up there agrees with the original criticism, and I think I may have seen the name before, somewhere. But maybe my memory is faulty...
Since you're complaining about the time such discussions waste, I'm wondering what you see as the end-game here? What do you believe to me more likely: those complaining now to throw up their hands and never mention it again, or the resistance against change slowly eroding until the terms disappear?
Because it's kinda tautological to use the discussion itself as the main argument for your side of a discussion. If that's the #1 argument against the change, actually making the change would solve it with absolute certainty.
And if you accept that there's a problem with "white officers getting away with killing unarmed black civilian", you shouldn't discount the power of words and symbols. Stuff like this may seem insignificantly small, but those problems are ultimately rooted in culture, and culture is nothing but ideas, which are nothing but words.
> you shouldn't discount the power of words and symbols
Words are not static entities. Language evolves in unpredictable ways. Master/slave became jargon based on a truly despicable thing, unfortunately, but the original meaning is an irrelevant detail in our technical context.
One can attack the idea of "context", but I think it is not very effective, or even honest. It is a leap of logic to imply that a single expression used in very specific moments is somehow related to atrocities happening right now. The words (and symbols and culture and ideas) argument is a killer abstraction and anything can be said with it.
I am black and I live in an extremely racist society. The habit of discussing this kind of thing can have a negative impact on what really matters. Even empathetic people could become tired.
I think you're good at heart, but you are wrong here. Words carry meaning, not only the meaning we each attach but also the meaning that is imposed on us. By your logic, white folks should be able to say nigger without black folks being upset about it, which is an absurd result of your premise.
Constantly maintaining a clear separation of symbolic meaning (words) and actual meaning (reality) is what monks and yogis do in a sense. It's a life-long discipline to do it perfectly, and it takes a lot of energy. The energy expended to constantly separate words from meaning is an unfair burden on certain classes.
Pick the right fight. How many man hours have we all wasted on this discussion already?
My time is valuable. Through my dollars earned I contribute to positive social change wherever possible. What's your contribution besides berating me?