More than 10 days of anti-racism sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black American, while being restrained by police officers, have seen a wave of demonstrations over race spread across Europe, including Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Australia.

Recently, many Internet companies have joined in. Within days, the ceos of Microsoft, Apple, Google, and other U.S. Internet companies expressed their support for racial equality in different ways.

And in the tech world, there have been some recent moves in support of the movement.

Google to get rid of blacklist

Google’s Chrome browser has seen several submissions related to racial discrimination. The main submission is to scrap the writing of “blacklist” :

The following figure shows the submission content of some files with the same name:

Because some developers feel that terms like “blacklist” and “whitelist” reinforce “black == bad, white == good” and are racist.

In the submission record, Chrome’s developers changed the Blacklist to blocklist. In fact, this change has been in place since Last October,

Since October, Chrome has included instructions on how to write “race neutral” code in its official code style guide. The document makes it clear that Chrome and Chromium developers should avoid using the terms “blacklist” and “whitelist” and instead use neutral terms “blocklist” and “allowlist.”

Technology has to be politically correct.

In addition to Chrome abolishing the “blacklist” expression, there are many similar incidents.

“Master/Slave”, as it is known to developers, is a common computing structure in distributed systems. This noun is a combination of two words: Master and Slave.

-Leonard: That’s my Master. I’m a Slave.

Many developers consider the term “slave” to be a violation of human rights, and there have been calls to modify the term.

Back in 2014, the Drupal project replaced master and slave with Primary and Replica; The Django project replaces them with leader and follower; The CouchDB project has done a similar linguistic cleansing.

In 2018, two of our most familiar software, Redis and Python, compromised for the sake of political correctness.

On September 7, 2018, Redis 5.0RC5 was released, which still used master-slave to represent the master-slave mode, which caused many developers to protest. A twitter poll by Redis’s authors found that more than half wanted the description changed.

Finally, the author of Redis decided to change the description of master-slave to master-Replica.

Also on September 7, 2018, Victor Stinner, a Python developer working at Red Hat, publicly submitted four PR’s, You want to change the “master” and “slave” that appear in Python documentation and code to terms like “parent” and “worker”, as well as other similar terms.

Guido van Rossum, the founder of Python who had announced his retirement from the Python core development team, was called back to discuss and arbitrate on the issue. Finally he made an important decision:

Plan to change slave to worker, helper, and master process to parent process in Python 3.8.

Recently, a developer of Golang also proposed a similar commit, requiring the modification of whitelist/blacklist, master/slave and other expressions:

Some of these changes are relatively simple, just changing the name. Afraid of some software modification after all kinds of compatibility problems.

So, a lot of software is cautious, but with a lot of voices getting louder, I believe many vendors will have to be politically correct eventually.

Oh, and there’s a place in America called the White House…