Curbing systemic racism by removing racist terms from the codebase

[Pavitra122]

Searching for "Black" showed up many terms that instill a negative bias towards the word Black. For diversity reasons, it would be nice to try to avoid using terms like Black Box and instead replace it with say Opaque box which clearly defines the meaning of the term.

https://github.com/bittorrent/bittorrent.org/search?q=black

[arvidn]

my understanding (although, not as a native english speaker) is that the term "Black art" is a metaphor in BEP 36. Avoiding metaphors in general is probably a good idea in technical writing. In that instance, it refers to something poorly defined that is solved with a large number of heuristics that have to be discovered. @Pavitra122 Could you propose a different term?

As for "black box", I suppose that is also a metaphor, in the sense that it's not a literal black box. However, it's also a term of art. Changing it to "opaque box" would be far worse in my opinion, since it would still be a metaphor (it's not a literal opaque box) but it would not be a term of art, so it would not be clear that it is a metaphor anymore.

The only use of "black box" in BEP 2 is an example of a data flow diagram. It could be changed to anything else that would make sense in such diagram, since its semantics is irrelevant. @Pavitra122 feel free to propose a change.

(I also fail to see how the word "black" in "black box" has a negative connotation, but maybe that's because I'm not a native english speaker. It seems just as neutral as "brown" in "brown noise", or "white" in "white noise").

[gubatron]

FFS...

This reminds me of the clusterf&# the Bitcoin Core code is becoming due to subjective interpretations of these terms. They changed "Blacklist" for "Blocklist" in a piece of software that deals with "Blocks" and "Block Lists" (as in Blockchain)

There's nothing wrong with the word Black, if you think it's a racist term you need to check yourself IMO.

[simbadMarino]

Why not erasing the word Black from the dictionary once and for all? lol, please check yourself as @gubatron said...

[fogoat]

PC industry went through some changes such as master/slave drives to primary/secondary. That change was necessary.

A search and replace of the word black to something else is frankly stupid. If this isn't trolling, then this is the typical far leftist (fascist) bs where people want new terms used instead. There were trolls on Microsoft GitHub that tried the same thing.