Hello Folks, I hope you are all doing well...
*The problem* The recent protests made me realize that we are not just a bystanders of the systematic racism that affect our society, but we are active participants of it. Being "non-racist" is not enough, I strongly feel we should be actively "anti-racist" in our day to day lives, and continuously check our biases. I assume most of you will agree with the general sentiment, but based on your exposure to the recent events and US culture/history might have more or less strong feelings about your role in the problem and potential solution. *What can we do about it?* I think a simple action we can take is to work on our code/comments/documentation/websites and remove racist terminology. Here is a IETF draft to fix up some of the most egregious examples (master/slave, whitelist/backlist) with proposed alternatives. https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html#rfc.section.1.1.1 Also as we go about this effort, we should also consider other "non-inclusive" terminology issues around gender (e.g., binary gendered examples, "Alice" doing the wrong security thing systematically), and ableism (e.g., referring to misbehaving hardware as "lame" or "limping", etc.). The easiest action item is to avoid this going forward (ideally adding it to the checkstyles if possible), a more costly one is to start going back and refactor away existing instances. I know this requires a bunch of work as refactorings might break dev branches and non-committed patches, possibly scripts, etc. but I think this is something important and relatively simple we can do. The effect goes well beyond some text in github, it signals what we believe in, and forces hundreds of users and contributors to notice and think about it. Our force-multiplier is huge and it matches our responsibility. What do you folks think? Thanks, Carlo
