The best reasoning I saw for this change was for clarity for non native English speakers. If you're learning the language "allowlist" is definitely more clear in meaning than "whitelist"

A lot of companies seem to be doing this, personally I think trying to make a connection between race and tech is a bit far fetched. Nobody thinks of race when talking about whitelists and blacklists...

In public repos where these changes are merged in to FOSS projects, they get little resistance too - although I could see concern of a potential backlash if anyone questioned the alleged benefit of such a change.

Imagine if this approach was taken with the (now outdated) IDE interface? Instead of "Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave", there'd maybe be "Primary Primary, Primary Secondary, Secondary Primary, Secondary Secondary" 😵‍

My company has recently started disallowing these words in code. The funny part though is the first few lines of the Jenkins job responsible for checking this stuff proudly states "Waiting for slave node to start checks."

I know it's a minor fix in the jenkinsfile but I chuckle every time I see it.

I do think dropping master is absurd, since it in no way implies slavery or any such thing. master mostly has uses that are entirely inoffensive, unless post-graduate degrees are racist, for example.

But I do think there is some merit in moving off the idea of white is good and black is bad. There are some good arguments that we shouldn't bestow magic powers upon words, but there is also a lot of merit in the idea that these words affect our perception in negative ways and there is really nothing lost by shifting to equally good alternatives.

In the wider context of computing and technology, "master" has historically often been paired with "slave" as well, such as old IDE hard drives that had to be switched from master to slave depending on which cable they were plugged into on which port of the motherboard. I realise that's a bit of an odd example, but there are numerous ones.

Anyway, while I don't think many people have ever used a branch name of slave, it's entirely feasible to argue that any branch that isn't master is in some way subservient to it as opposed to the master branch being the most experienced. The point isn't to debate that the way you view it is incorrect, your view is entirely reasonable and rational but in order to be inclusive we should take all other views into account and in a very simple way, rather than debate the meaning of the word master in this specific context and telling people that they're "wrong" for feeling a certain way about it, it's easy to change the word and thanks to the excellent design of git, there isn't really any downsides to it.