Interesting thoughts, but it doesn't address the content of the article. The article is saying renaming master to main in Github won't help race relations one bit and he's annoyed that it's probably white people who come up with these things rather than (his example) putting money into retraining for ethnic minorities who change careers.
All your points are true and using positive language around race does matter. Just the desire to remove the word master (which also means principle) from use will not help a single black person or ethnic minority and is simply designed to look good without any real progress being made.
This kind of reaction by Americans are amazing to me as a Mexican. It's like... Americans jump to all these hoops and loops to show how NON RACIST and NON DISCRIMINATORY they are but then keep discriminating and being racist in small everyday things.
I had the opportunity of living in the UK and Germany for several years. Sure, there's racist people there (particularly in Eastern Germany where I lived!). But in general I liked the feeling of not being racist just by... not being racist. When race just doesn't matter, is when you really have killed racism.
So yeah, keep removing statues, renaming stuff and do anything else that makes you sleep at night. But at the end of the day if you want to stop discriminating, just... stop discriminating.
> The article is saying renaming master to main in Github won't help race relations one bit and he's annoyed that it's probably white people who come up with these things.
I think he's right that it was probably white people who came up with it.
My first point is that words do matter. We can debate how much the specific word "master" matters, but my point was that words do matter.
My other point about investing also supports his main thesis.
I guess what the article was suggesting was that context determines whether words matter and it's ridiculous to determine that words matter for someone else without including them in the conversation.
All your points are true and using positive language around race does matter. Just the desire to remove the word master (which also means principle) from use will not help a single black person or ethnic minority and is simply designed to look good without any real progress being made.