Re: [Gendispatch] draft-knodel-terminology-02

[Bob Hinden <[e-mail]>]

John,


> On Jul 22, 2020, at 9:37 AM, John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> In article <048201d65124$fe4cd910$fae68b30$@olddog.co.uk> you write:
>> Thanks, Niels and Mallory, for having the strength to persevere with this important topic. I would
>> like to see the IETF reach some fairly rapid resolution on the thrust of your work so that we can
>> advise authors and the RPC on the way we want to use language.
> 
> Having finally gotten around to reading this draft, i think there is
> some good advice combined with unhelpful and sometimes ahistoric
> purported motivations.
> 
> We can stop referring to things as master and slave because we think
> slavery is bad. As others have noted, western hemisphere race-based
> slavery is only one variety, and vast numbers of people all over the
> world became enslaved because they were the wrong religion, the wrong
> side at the end of a battle, the wrong sex, or just in the wrong place
> at the wrong time.
> 
> Similarly, blacklist is a term that goes back to the 1500s and has
> been used to sanction people for activities such as union organizing
> or, in the mid-20th century US, accusations of political affiliation.
> We can agree that blacklisting people is bad without making false
> connections to race.
> 
> The gratuitous racial references have two other unfortunate effects:
> one is to give an implicit free pass to people from other cultural
> backgrounds, and they ignore terms that really are about race such as
> the verbs "grandfather" and "redline".
> 
> Finally, the proposed list of substitutes isn't very good. Rather than
> try and come up with others at this point, I would suggest people
> think about what the thing they're describing is actually doing, and
> the implications of the metaphors they use. Master/slave implies that
> the slave has to do what the master says, which is usually what's
> intended, but also that the master can sell the slave, which is not.
> Look for something where the metaphor actually matches what it's
> describing.

I agree with you, I think we should stop using terminology like master/slave, white/black list, etc, in IETF specifications.

Also, that the current document needs a lot of work before it could go forward.

To Pete’s email, where should this work take place?

Bob

> 
> R's,
> John
> 
> PS: English has a perfectly good non-gendered singular pronoun but
> I've given up reminding people about it.
> 
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