Brandeis University considers 'picnic' to be oppressive language

In My Humble Opinion
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Ok, I understand that perspective, now let me summarize my perspective (I’m British as well btw).

Time after time I have encountered these articles about “Political correctness gone mad!” and they are almost always complete horseshit. Their ability to get people angry correlates only with their fitness as a meme, not with how true they are. Witness in the UK the nonsense about “Winterval” being supposedly an attempt to outlaw the word “Christmas”.

So then what about this thread? It opens with a completely misleading OP and title (not deliberately, and the OP has conceded the mistake). Then we have an example of “master password” which, as someone who once worked on a support desk I can say no-one cares about and no-one ever got chastised for. Then, at the end of that, several posts about how we should recognize the harm we’re causing. Erm…no. How about even one example of this supposed problem first?

(Or, if “harm” simply means “Many people believe this shit, and it’s one of conservative channels’ most potent weapons” I agree that that harm exists. I just don’t think that harm is the fault of Brandeis or any other obscure source that people can find to jump on)

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On this particular issue, I was super-irritated by such a needless change but I literally had no idea why we were changing it until just a couple of weeks ago. When I found out why, I was irrationally angry. No Fox News required.

One subculture in one corner of one country had caused 10s of 1000s of hours of work for millions of programmers around the world because someone might have bad associations with the word master.

The idea that “master” was offensive was almost certainly dreamed up by a group of college kids in an anti-racist workshop in a university somewhere. Hey kids! What words can we name that might be offensive to someone, somewhere in the world? Don’t worry! They are just suggestions! It’s not like we are making laws or anything. We’ll just put them on the website.

Prohibitions on words like “gypsy” and “lame” just make me roll my eyes. Sure, if some white people suddenly decided that gypsy is offensive now, I can change my language. Whatever. I might slip up, but I’ll do my best. I’m not sure what to call “our” gypsies though because most of them are not Roma and the term is used in law. We’ll just have a long inter-regnum where we’ll struggle to talk about want we to talk about and if anyone slips up in public, we can just cancel them.

It’s not just these two words though. It’s hundreds. Seemingly every day there are more. It’s tiring.

A few weeks ago, an official in the FA (like the NFL, but for football) had to resign because he said “coloured people” instead of “people of colour”. Sure, he’s had a long time to learn and should have known better. But he didn’t and he’s old and he was speaking extemporaneously. He was actually speaking in defence of anti-racism when he said it. And (note well!), the people around him did not say “you know, we do not use that term any more”. No. They made him into a national disgrace and forced him out of his job. He’ll never work again.

We are all familiar with having our cheese moved and we roll our eyes and shake our heads and get on with our lives. But this feels like an educational-industrial organization of professional cheese-movers who are looking for the next piece of cheese to move.

I was also angry about the Doctor Seuss thing. I was angry that a corporation decided that a book I love was thrown down the memory hole because it might offend someone. It’s true, the book had racist images but so did a lot of things in the 1930s. Will they all go down the memory hole? Can we not find a way to point out that some works of art contain racist imagery without cancelling them entirely.

Keep telling yourself that it’s just an outrage manufactured by Fox News. I read it in The Guardian.

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I wrote my previous post before I read yours, FWIW

Those articles are written by rabble-rousers but they work because they reveal a truth. You can’t deny that there is great cultural change happening at the moment, and that it disturbs a lot of people who do not read The Daily Mail or watch Fox News.

At the risk of both-sidesing, the extremists on the right find political gain in pretending that everyone on the left wants to ban the word picnic. I’m not sure what gain the people on the left enjoy by pretending that everyone who disagrees with them is a racist.

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But that “truth” is exactly the thing I’m asking for. We’re just seeing examples of myths and trivialities and being asked to take it seriously. Well, let’s see the serious stuff.

Now in fairness, I think you’ve brought up some good ones to discuss now in your previous post, so I’ll just add my 2c:

I think this is a misframing. The point is, that “slave” may well cause offense given the history that the US is still struggling to come to terms with.
“Master password” was only brought up in this thread in scrambling for an example of somewhere “master” became disfavored without a corresponding “slave”.
It’s a contrived example, because the term “master/primary password” rarely comes up anyway, and, if someone does say “master password” no-one cares IME.

“Lame” is still widely-used, if some day a group representing the disabled claim that it is offensive, then I would stop using that word, it’s not a big deal. “Gypsy” has always been used as a pejorative in my time growing up in the UK (like “Paki” it refers to a group and is an epithet); surely you can’t be claiming that it’s a big shock that that word causes offense?
I actually switched to “Roma” years ago, without being prompted, because I didn’t like using a word which I knew was often used hurtfully.

That’s unfortunate, and I would have hoped that an apology would have been enough.

Racial epithets against blacks in particular do have special status (hence “n-word”) because of the level of oppression that they have struggled with throughout history. Centuries of slavery, genocides and then systemic discrimination. You don’t need to keep up with the status of all words like “lame”, but you do need to be aware of racial epithets because weeding out that kind of racism is of core importance to society getting over its past and having an inclusive society.

Well the owners of the books themselves decided to drop some titles from sale, which isn’t really cancel culture. It’s completely their prerogative, and there are still millions of those books out there as well as the originals, so they are not lost to history.

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I don’t want to nit-pick this too much because it’s just one small irritant among many and it’s an obscure technical thing that most people won’t care about. A micro-aggression, if you will.

Before the change, I used to type

git push master origin

about 30 times a day. Now I type

git push main origin

It’s not just that I had to remember to type a different thing. I had to update all my systems to accommodate this change. Me and a million other programmers. This one caused real cost.

But, again, it’s not just this one thing and it’s not just racial epithets. It’s a seemingly endless stream of newly proscribed words with punishments ranging from gentle correction for ‘oriental’ (‘we don’t say that anymore’) to ‘you will never work again’ (or appear on Jeopardy) for words that it was fine to say about 10 minutes ago.

Most of the people that you might call ‘gypsy’ in the UK are not Roma. They are Irish Travellers. Roma is an ethnic group that came from India about 1000 years ago. FYI (because I researched this recently and it is interesting) the Irish Travellers came a long time ago too. Long enough to have a distinct language and genome.

When I was a kid, my Dad took me to the Working Man’s Club which had a sign on the door saying “No Travellers”. The hurt was in the racism, not in the name. The law (and Irish Travellers themselves) refers to them as gypsies. Roma is inaccurate.

I also took offence at the idea that a corporation still owns the right to throw a 93-year old book down the memory hole. I think I am the only liberal who still cares about that.

FWIW This is the debate that we on the left should be having. What’s the harm? What are the benefits? Who does it hurt? Who does it help? I correct your misunderstandings, you correct mine. I have no idea of DemonTree’s politics but I was gob-smacked at the ire that he stirred up with (what seemed to me) very reasonable and moderate arguments. If we can’t have this discussion politely among ourselves then we deserve all of those Daily Mail articles about the Looney Left.

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Only that that did not take place, in libraries and eventually digital copies, the books will remain for others to check what the fuss was about.

As the Dr. Seuss book case showed, there is another “looney” left alright, IMHO it is the one that ignores how the right wing media manages to mislead centrists and even leftists into their mistaken narrative.

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That was true with me with regards to abortion, which I formerly considered myself a moderate on, because while I want access to always remain as it is or even expand in many cases, there were many people on the right who said “ban all abortions!” and there were so many people on the left who answered that with “no restrictions at all!” that “abortions for some, miniature American flags for others” seemed to be a good middle ground rather than a relatively liberal position.

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A few weeks ago, an official in the FA (like the NFL, but for football) had to resign because he said “coloured people” instead of “people of colour”. Sure, he’s had a long time to learn and should have known better. But he didn’t and he’s old and he was speaking extemporaneously. He was actually speaking in defence of anti-racism when he said it. And (note well!), the people around him did not say “you know, we do not use that term any more”. No. They made him into a national disgrace and forced him out of his job. He’ll never work again.

Are you talking about FA chief Greg Clarke? I just read a story about him that sounds similar to what you’re describing, but it’s not quite a match. This is a story from November of 2020.

From that story:

During the hearing, Clarke also claimed that “if you go to the IT department at the FA, there’s a lot more South Asians than there are Afro Caribbeans” because “they have different career interests.” He described homosexuality as a “life choice” and claimed one coach told him girls playing football don’t like the ball being kicked at their face.

If this is who you’re talking about, I think there’s a little more to the story.

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If we outlaw “Oriental”, will we have to re-draw the “Monopoly” board? :slight_smile:

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I’m grateful for the opportunity to read @kevlaw 's perspective.

I might offer an analogy.

My wife is a health care provider. Far too many of her patients “do everything wrong” with regard to healthy lifestyle choices (NB: I know I’m already at risk of being interpreted as saying that some on the conservative side ‘do everything wrong.’ That isn’t my meaning.)

The endless nitpicks can revolve around sleep, drinking soda pop and beer but never water, eating nothing but processed food and snacks. Never eating vegetables, gorging on simple sugars, feeding their babies a couple liters a day of incredibly high sugar fruit juices, etc., etc.

They smoke, they drink too much, they do street drugs, they get absolutely no exercise.

To many of her patients, it must feel like they’re being scolded to a ridiculous degree – barraged with interminable messages that clearly say … you’re doing everything wrong … when my wife picks a ‘behavior’ and discusses healthier options.

But in a very narrow way, they are doing all of these things ‘wrong,’ and – statistically – harm is the very likely result.

So many of these words we’re talking about are conscious/unconscious demonization – the kind we’ve used in every war since … ever … to dehumanize the enemy and make it easier for decent people to kill them.

It’s the water we swim in. It’s indicia, letting us know where we are and how we’re doing.

Words lead to thoughts, lead to actions (eg, discriminatory policies, practices, and laws), etc.

“Microaggression” has become a snarl word, akin to “PC,” “woke,” and “Social Justice Warrior.” Well done, Conservatives.

But I want my wife’s patients to be healthier, their kids to have better futures, our air and water to be cleaner, and our society to become more just.

We can debate all day long – and we should – about pace and tactics, but “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” but only if we keep forcing it to bend.

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Firstly the change was only for new repositories. So any code for existing repositories would still be fine, and it is just remembering a new term.

Secondly any developer knows that commands, and naming conventions, do change, and become deprecated all the time. I can’t remember the last time I worked on a project where no APIs had been updated, so this cost is always there.

Good to know, thanks (genuinely).
How is this a defense of the word “gypsy”, though, which is the thing you were originally saying you were rolling your eyes at?

That’s a fine debate to have. But before that, and remember again the original topic of this thread, it’s worth acknowledging that PC and “Cancel culture” is 99% manufactured outrage by dishonest sources like FOX and the Daily Mail. Beyond that, sure, let’s talk about whether certain recommendations from so and so Uni go too far.

I can’t believe I assumed someone’s description of a “PC gone mad!” incident was accurate. I broke my own rule :man_facepalming:

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My husband, who also recently made that change, points out that it’s two characters shorter, and so is a net win. (But he actually types git push o[tab] ma[tab] … because tab completes the word.) But… I’ve had to learn several entirely new programming languages. I don’t mean to be overly dismissive of your inconvenience, but here in the US there really are people who find it uncomfortable to work with “master” in that sense. So a US-based platform has depreciated the word, to the relief of a lot of US-based programmers.

Oh, I care a lot about the excesses of our copyright law. I think you are focusing on a very irrelevant point in blaming this on “PC culture”. The problem is that long after the death of the author a copyright owner can withhold a work from the public domain.

I don’t care if they don’t want to sell it anymore. Surely that’s their right. I do care that they can legally prevent anyone else from publishing it.

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To see how that sounds, try this one on for size. “We are not banning Jane Eyre, we are just making it so you can’t buy it anymore.”

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But you wouldn’t want to force anyone in particular to print it, right? I’m willing to bet those books weren’t selling very well.

I should probably stop here, because otherwise I’ll completely hijack the thread. But our copyright law is badly broken.

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Try this instead: it is not the government or loony leftists who decided that, it was Jane Eyre’s state choice.

Remember, to Eyre is human… :slightly_smiling_face:

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The point is that gypsy is not a racial slur if it’s a term applied to many different races. Certainly exchanging the word gypsy for Roma is not a viable solution in such case.

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Do girls playing football like having balls kicked in their face? Do South Asians have different career interests than Afro Caribbeans? I don’t know.

They all strike me as gauche things to say but they are all things that I would expect an older gentleman, who is not tuned in to the wokevine, to believe.

You might disagree with his opinions. I certainly do — they are misguided outdated — and if I were his boss, I would have a word with him. I don’t think any of them are especially offensive. He’s probably wrong on all counts, but I don’t think any of them of them are firing offences.

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Ok it’s not a racial slur but it’s still a slur; like I say, it has always been used pejoratively in my lifetime of living in the UK, and groups like the Roma have said they consider it offensive.
So whatever word we use (and why do we need to lump Irish and Romani travellers together within one term anyway?), probably not “gypsy”.

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Speaking as one who manages a software product, and has many engineers making this kind of change now, you are trivializing the cost. Make no mistake about it, this is a VERY expensive change. Certainly a developer can learn a new command, and they can replace a string pretty quickly in a codebase when needed, but when it comes to managing the product lifecycle and go-to-market this kind of change costs literally tens of millions of dollars in a large organization like mine.

The term master is used pervasively, and only in a minority of cases is it coupled with the slave term. It usually manifests itself on UIs, in training documentation and videos, product certification exams, marketing collateral and an ungodly number of surprising new locations. It requires a coordinated retraining of an entire workforce, completely new style guides which need constant diligence to enforce, lots of QA and bugfix cycles when one person pushes the wrong word by mistake. This is a massively impactful thing, and unfortunately we’ll probably find a new firedrill in a few years.

Mastering is a word with a lot of meanings. Well meaning people without much common sense are now telling educators that they can’t claim their learners have “mastered the topic”. This is not progress.

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I think that these two passages are worth repeating when considering the totality of this conversation:

Liberals, progressives, lefties, etc… of whom I consider myself to be one, need to hear and consider this without dismissing it as right-wing FoxNews fiction and fearmongering. We can all recognize when the right is manufacturing outrage. But the above is not the product of the right-wing lunatic fringe machine. It’s what they are responding to. It’s the grist for their mill. The question is, can we on the left adjust our behaviour in such a way as to not be quite such easy targets?