After Google, Microsoft owned GitHub has decided to replace racially insensitive terms like ‘master’ and ‘slave’ with neutral terms. CEO of GitHub said that they will replace terms like ‘master’ with ‘main’ to avoid any unnecessary references to slavery.
The company CEO also says that terms like ‘slave’ will be dropped for alternatives like “main/default/primary” and “secondary;” and also terms like “blacklist” and “whitelist” for “allow list” and “deny/exclude list.”
But GitHub is not alone who is changing racial terms. The Android mobile operating system, the Go programming language, the PHPUnit library, and the Curl file download utility have stated similar intentions to replace blacklist/whitelist with neutral alternatives. Similarly, the OpenZFS file storage manager has also replaced its master/slave terms used for describing relations between storage environments with suitable replacements.
Google also changing almost 2000 similar terms in Chromium codebase. Google referred that “terms such as ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ reinforce the notion that black=bad and white=good.” It suggests the use of “blocklist” and “allowlist” instead.
