Politically Correct Hypocrisy in the Tech Industry
In the last few weeks we have all been witnesses of a historical moment. I’m talking about all the protests that arose after the murder of George Floyd.
I don’t know if any substantial change will come after this for vulnerable people, but I hope so. I totally support the Black Lives Matter movement.
But I’m not here to analyze the United States society, their politics or anything like that. I’m not even from the US. I’m writing this to point out a few hypocritical behaviors I saw in the tech industry. Some of them with the best intentions, some of them as a “politically correct” way of marketing. All of them useless and absurd.
Some people started to ban words of the tech industry. If you don’t agree with them you are instantly tagged as racist and get “cancelled” by a large, or at least powerful, sector of the tech ecosystem. If you are one of the unlucky people tagged as racist, you will probably struggle to find a job and to get into a community.
People are free to “cancel” whoever they want, but that’s what discrimination actually is. By definition. The thing is that this kind of discrimination is not socially (or legally) punished.
But let’s get back to the words that are now banned:
Blacklist/whitelist: So, a blacklist is bad. But the origin of this word, his historical use and the use we give it in the industry has nothing to do with skin color or race. You may ask why the black color is associated to something bad and white to the good things. Basically, humans fear to darkness. That’s how we’ve survived. We fear to the unknown and the things that we can’t see. You probably will walk more carefully in a dark room and you are not a racist for that.
(Not so) Funny fact: blacklists were historically used to ban people from getting jobs (and other kinds of persecution) because they didn’t share the “good” ideology.
Master is another banned word. Even if that can mean different things and nobody ever used the “slave” term regarding Git, it’s a racist word. Because in the US not so long ago, black people were enslaved.
I can’t even start to talk about how US-centric is this approach.
Are we going to stop using the “kill process” term because of all the killed people by the US army, or by the dictatorships they supported and support? Or those killed people were too priviliged to take care of them?
I’m from an undeveloped country, that is a derogatory term for poor countries. Developed countries are the rich and powerful ones. So maybe we should stop using the word “development” for programming or product creation?
In the company I work for, they banned those kind of words. But they pay me around 4 times less than a person with the same job in the US. As an experienced developer I will probably never be able to buy a house (neither a studio apartment), unless I have a stroke of luck. I have to take care every time I leave home and pay for private security to be safe. I’ve been assaulted at least 5 times.
But I have to put up with people earning 4 times my salary, in a rich and safe country, to tell me that I’m priviliged and that I need empathy to understand that a stupid non-racist word is offensive.
And that’s the hypocrisy I’m talking about in the title of this article. The US people of the tech industry doesn’t even realize the privilege they have. Even if they are woman, black, latino or muslim. Just by speaking English as a native language you are one step ahead the rest of us. We communicate, work and even code in English. All the documentation of everything is in English.
We do everything in English even if the people working on the project all have the same native language that is not English. I don’t think that is racist at all, and I don’t believe we should change it. But that’s a real privilege (or pain, depending on who you are) in the industry.
Really, what those word changes will do in favor of equal opportunities for all? There are real problems out there.
As a final note, I am definitely priviliged in the context of my country. I know that. The whole point of this post is that the tech industry doesn’t exist only in the US, and that US society problems doesn’t apply in the same way to the global tech industry.
Hypocritical solutions to nonexistent problems doesn’t solve anything and they just encourage discrimination to people who think differently and people that is left out because they aren’t part of those first-world societies.
Because of that I had to keep my identity hidden, to keep my job and career safe. It’s sad to be afraid of giving an opinion.
