 And now we have another one from Rich Bowen, who is a community organizer or community manager in Ospo, the same group that Marie works in, but he works on CentOS. You may also know him from Apache because he is huge in the Apache community. And yes, there's no laughing, it's true. And it worked on RDO and a bunch of other stuff at Rithat before and is now doing awesome things for helping build community at CentOS. So actually Rich gave a version of this talk internally and I said this seems important for Fedora as well. So I invited him here for this, so I'm looking forward. Thank you, Rich. Thank you, Matthew. Thanks for inviting me, Marie. I'm going to talk about something that has generated a bit of controversy in open source as a whole over the last few months. You may have noticed this conversation happening in the Langsternal community. And I'm actually part of heading an effort toward this at Rithat and that is removing words from documentation and our software that marginalize or otherwise oppress minorities within our organizations in an attempt to make our communities more welcoming. Now I have to start with this disclaimer, right? I'm a white middle-aged bearded man living in suburbia in a state that continues to re-elect Mitch McConnell every year. So what can I possibly tell you? Well, I want to skip to the punchline right up front and I hope that this is what you take with you as you go away, as you forget the rest of it. The reason that I feel that I have something to say is twofold. One is that I have a certain power and influence in a community to make changes that other people may not have. And it's my responsibility to use that privilege in a way that helps people who do not have that privilege. And the way that I am able to have these opinions is that I listen. I listen to minority voices, I read minority Twitter, I follow people that perhaps would not have the loud voice that I can give in my position. If this sounds self-congratulatory, if this sounds pretentious, that's because this is aspirational. This is something that I strive for every day, that I strive towards this high goal that I'm claiming is something that I do. But what I want to encourage you to do is to listen to minority voices on Twitter. Watch Emanuel Acho's video series, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. Listen more than you speak. If you have questions, read some more. Be uncomfortable and deal with that uncomfortableness and remember that your moment of discomfort is just a shadow of the daily discomfort and actual suffering of so many other people. I alone cannot change the world, but I can use my influence to change a small part of it. So what are we talking about? Well, several months ago on Twitter, I saw the tweet that you see on your screen now, and it said, I refuse to use whitelist and blacklist or master and slave terminology in my software, Words Matter. And this is something that I had been thinking about for a number of years. I hadn't done much about it. So I decided that in a software project that I have a lot of influence on, I would make this change. So I'm one of the members of the Apache web server software project. I have been for 20 years, and I made this change. I went into the project. I made the change. I committed it. And that was something that I could do because I had this privilege and that I have social capital that I could spend on that. So then the question is why would we do this? And there are two primary reasons why this change is important. And I'm going to focus on the word blacklist because it's one that people of color in the United States have been talking about for generations. Using black in a negative connotation like blacklist, like blackmail, it calls attention to the fact that a part of a person's identity, their blackness, is a metaphor, means bad, means evil, means reject. And this is a death by a thousand paper cuts. Every day you're faced with this notion that an aspect of your identity means bad. And then, you know, me personally, I'm faced with the fact that white means good. And these things build up over time. Now the secondary reason is that if we use words in English that are not an analogy that are not a metaphor for something else, they are in fact clearer to communicate the concepts. They're easier to translate. And they are words that end up communicating better the concepts rather than through analogy. And so here's my change to the Apache web server. It was a minor thing. I recognize that in many software projects, this is not a minor thing. It involves changing APIs. It involves changing configuration variables. In my particular project, this was an easy change. And I don't want to make, I don't want to trivialize this and say it's just five minutes of work. It was five minutes of work for me, but this is a special case. Couple days later, an old friend of mine, Sebastian Bergman, announced that he was doing the same thing in PHP unit, which is a very critical part of the PHP ecosystem. And in each of these cases, these actions, these comments generated a lot of backlash. And that's really where I want to focus is, is talking about the reasons that people object to these things. There are many, many reasons to object to these things. And I want to emphasize that all of the objections, most of the objections are objectively true. They are things that are valid arguments. And you have to weigh those valid arguments against the benefits of making these changes. Even if you, so it's important. One of the, one of the mantras at Red Hat is assume good intent. When you go into a situation where somebody is irritating you, you have to assume step back and think, why are they doing this? What is their valid reason for doing this? They're not just doing it to be a jerk. So most of these responses that I get, I believe, came from well-meaning people that were objecting to a disruptive change that they did not see a direct benefit to. And some of these arguments are indeed petty, but most of them are not. Most of them are important. Folks will argue that they have not experienced the negative impact of these words. And, you know, they often point to me and said, I haven't, I haven't experienced that either. And that's very true. I have never been oppressed a day in my life. And so I have to believe, as I said earlier, other voices that tell me that this is a problem. And they'll argue that they're, well, let me jump into it. Here are some of the things that people will argue that the first thing is that that's not what those words mean. And this is objectively true. It is true that the etymological origins of the word blacklist have nothing to do with skin color. This is true. This is objectively true. And you can trace it back through history and see when this word occurred. And that is really not the point. The point is that a word means in someone's mind how they perceive it. Words change over time. Language evolves. It's a feature of language. One of my, I'm fascinated by etymology. I would encourage you to look up the etymology of the word awful, which means beautiful and inspiring and filling me with wonder. That's what the word awful means. Obviously, it doesn't mean that anymore. But if you hang your hat on the etymological argument, that's what happens. You end up getting stuck in definitions of words that have no relevance today. The next thing that, oh, and I encourage you to watch. You can find this a dozen places on YouTube. Muhammad Ali gave a talk numerous times about the word black. And if you Google Muhammad Ali black and white, you'll find several versions of this. And he says, why is it? He says, I used to ask my mom, why is it that white always represents goodness in our society? Why is angel food cake white, but devil's food cake is black? And he's talking, you know, he's making this humorous, but he's talking about a very serious point that impacted his psyche growing up as a kid, always seeing black associated with negative things. Um, many people say we're used to these old words. They work fine for us. I don't find it offensive. So it's a waste of time. What is critical to remember here is that you are not the gatekeeper on other people's emotions. You don't get to say what is or is not offensive to other people. Now, I tend to, I tend to try to avoid the word offensive because it gives this notion that people are enraged about things. And that's simply not the case. We're just talking about daily, uh, daily things that affect you in small ways that build up over time and give people a, a negative self image. And if we remove those things, we can make our communities so much more welcoming to beginners. And we want these beginners in our communities. This is enlightened self interest. We want people to join our projects. Uh, I about that. Um, here's, here's another, another quote from the, uh, the wisdom of Twitter. Don't tell people what level of oppression they should be comfortable with. Don't tell them that they're not an expert in their own experiences. Okay. Now here's, here's a legitimate objection. If I change the, uh, configuration variable blacklist in my spam assassin software, then literally millions of people will have to learn the new terms. They will have to learn the new ways to configure things. Now, this is a legitimate objection, but there are two ways to address this. One is that you should have a deprecation cycle, particularly in software that is widely deployed. If you make this change, you need to support the old terminology for a reasonable period of time and deprecated in a way that notifies people that they're using a term that will go away. That way you don't break massive installations of software out there and make life objectively worse for more people. Um, but, you know, in most real cases, you can replace the old words with the new words in your configuration scripts with a one line said command. Um, and it's also important to remember, as I said, all the way back at the beginning, it might be good for you to experience a little inconvenience to remind you of why we're doing this in the first place, to remind you of the daily inconveniences that people experience that have these experiences that are not yours. Now, this particular argument is one that really gets under my skin. People say, well, if we, if we change blacklist to deny list, then pretty soon people won't be able to use black ink anymore. And that sounds ridiculous, but this is an actual argument that was made to me saying that we'll have to remove the word black, we'll have to remove all color designations from our software, ship everything in sepia tones, which may be offensive to other people. And this, this is a slippery slope argument. It's a logical fallacy. It's not true. But I want to mention one thing if, if folks say if we change this word, we'll have to change that word. It's worth considering whether that other word is itself a problem. And I, you know, you can't dismiss that when people say maybe this other term is offensive as well. And I'm going to get back to that in just a moment, because this entire process has has educated me and many others as to phrases and concepts that are hurtful to people of other cultures that I'm completely ignorant of. So invariably, when we talk about removing the word slave and blacklist from our software, someone will invoke Orwell. Someone will say that we are creating new speak, that we are banning words, that this is this will lead inevitably to not being able to speak because all of our words are banned. So I want to make a couple points about that. One is that Orwell himself spoke at length, wrote at length about how words shape reality. If, if we use words that tell a group of people that they are less than, then that becomes their reality. And perception is in many senses, reality. If we tell people every day that their identity, their blackness makes them an evil, bad, less than individual, then that will affect their psyche in profound ways. The other thing that I would bring to your attention is that there are lots of words that we do not use in software documentation. We do not routinely put profanity in our software documentation. We do not make religious analogies in software documentation, typically, because it calls out a group of people and, and is can, can be very oppressive. So this is this is not unique. This is about compassion. It's about finding words that describe concepts, but don't harm your community in the process. I was, I was having a conversation with an individual on Twitter and he said, look, this is great. You should make this change. But eventually we will have to spend all of our time listening to what offends people and compensating for it. And this actually struck me as very unintentionally profound because as a community manager, as a software documentation person, this is, it's what I do. I listen for things that are causing roadblocks in your life experience. And I try to remove those. And that's what that's what compassion is. Compassion is in fact a ceaseless circle of listening to people and trying to ease their discomfort. And that is so critical to the human experience. Compassion is not a checkbox. Compassion is not something that you say, OK, I've done that. I can move on to the rest of my tasks. It is, in fact, an endless cycle. Now, at this point in the conversation, people tend to say, folks are too easily offended. People will find something to be offended about no matter what you do. And yeah, this is this is objectively true. Some people are just trying to pick a fight and find something to be offended about. And there does indeed come a point when you cannot compensate for people that are just trying to cause trouble. Discerning which is which is also an endless cycle. Assuming good intent is exhausting. But it is what we have to do as humans to support one another. We have to assume good intent or we will end up, you know, hating everybody and indeed being oppressive to everybody as we think only of ourselves. So it's kind of aspirational and something that indeed we all strive towards. We all have bad days. And that's the moment when you should step away from the keyboard and go work on your yard or something, because not all of us can maintain compassion all the time. And that's just a reality. And Sarah talked a little bit about this in the last presentation. You have to be willing to step away when things become too contentious. But surely, surely it is worth making compassionate changes in order to bring that one additional person into your project who may be the person that comes up with the next killer feature. So yes, I just mentioned this, but. We definitely should not try to be the arbiters of language. Now, this particular part of the discussion is incredibly important because I know that I'm speaking to an international audience here. And many of you who are not US Americans on this presentation are saying like, this is this is not about me. This is a specifically United States concept that is rooted in a particular time period. And indeed in the United States, there are people living today whose grandparents were enslaved. This is the reality that we deal with when we walk out the door and we see people that don't look like us. We we have to remember that their cultural experience, their historical experience includes these things that are still hurtful day to day. But during this process, I have become educated myself about things that are that are culturally difficult, that are that are harmful and oppressive in many other cultures. Now, I personally grew up in Kenya, in East Africa. So I'm aware of a set of of cultural norms that are, you know, shaped by the African continent and by the large immigrant population that, you know, maybe some other people wouldn't have seen. But but during this time, people have educated me about things that are that are problematic to the European population based on their history of of international conflicts and interracial conflicts and intertribal conflicts. And so, yeah, this particular thing that I'm talking about right now, I'm focusing on blacklist and slave. And that is indeed a US centric word choice. But these things exist everywhere. And once you start taking this seriously and you look around at the underrepresented people in your culture, those are going to be different from the ones in mine. And they are each a unique, unrepeatable, individual person, just like you. And you need to treat them as such rather than as as Charles Dickens said, other passengers on other journeys. Now, this one is particularly important. I've been asked to head up this effort at Red Hat. There's there's several of us that are working at Red Hat to remove the words blacklist and slave and certain other things from all Red Hat products and services. And you may very legitimately say, well, this is a bunch of white men. We're all white men in this project that are trying to do this for for press recognition. And it is critical for us to not make it about that. And, you know, I'm even reluctant to give presentations like that, but like this, because it's all a game, I'm doing this wonderful thing. But this is not just that. And I hope that you hold our feet to the fire on this. I hope that you keep us honest about this. This is not about us saying, yeah, Red Hat. This is about trying to be more welcoming. And we hope we hope that that Red Hat's reputation supports that idea. We hope that you believe us. But if you find evidence to the contrary, please yell at us. This is this is important. This is not about the press. And finally, I think this is my last point here. People say this doesn't fix racism. Of course it doesn't. This is one tiny thing that I can do. Now, I can do it because I've been working in open source documentation for roughly 25 years. This is what I've given my life to. It is a I have a unique set of skills and I choose to apply them in this way. I can't change legislature. I cannot fix institutional poverty that comes out of these problems. But what I can do is exercise my skill. Big changes are comprised of many small changes. Those of us in open source. This is just one thing that we can do. There's so many others. And I don't want to imply for a moment that this fixes anything. It doesn't it doesn't fix anything, but it chips away a tiny thing. Some people say that making these changes simply calls attention to the negative connotations and in a sense that it does. Maybe it makes you feel uncomfortable about these words. Maybe it makes you uncomfortable the next time you read your documentation and you see the word slave there and that draws attention to it and makes you uncomfortable. Maybe that will cause you to have a little bit more compassion. So I'm not even sure that this is necessarily a bad thing. And then, of course, there are people who say, well, I walked up the hill in the snow to school every day and everyone else should have to as well. And I this is the point at which I stop having the conversation. Because if you have to explain to somebody why they need to be compassionate, then they may not be the target of your conversation. I I I also see a number of people who phrase this as this is simply political correctness and does not have any practical implications in the lives of real people. And I have. Anecdotes from real people that say that it does make a difference. It makes them feel more welcome in the community. But as as George Bernard Shaw said, you don't want to wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and the pig likes it. And there are some arguments. I make this quote simply to say there's some arguments that just aren't worth your time to have. The people who say that things are impossible shouldn't get in the way of the people that are doing them. Now, one thing that I've also discovered through this process, it's not new information. I've known this for years. If I get 100 positive feedbacks on this talk and one person comes and says that I am wasting my time and theirs, my mind, because I have a human brain in here, I'm going to focus on that negative one. And if you choose to join me in this effort, you're going to get a lot of hate and it hates the wrong word. You're going to get a lot of pushback because as I said, many of these are are good objections. They are objectively true, but you need to learn. You can train yourself to focus on the positive. Again, as Sarah mentioned a half an hour ago, I want to close by saying that I have focused on two words. I focused on blacklist and slave. And the reason that I have focused on this and the reason that our effort at Red Hat is focusing on this is because they are the ones that are the easiest to explain. They are the ones that it's easiest to show people why these are hurtful. And there are a lot of other words out there that we use routinely in documentation. We use terms about mental health. We use terms about physical attributes in our documentation. We use the word he in every context when we are almost unaware that we're excluding half of the human race by doing that. We use colloquialisms like wrestling with a pig and looking back to slides. I left this slide in there intentionally because I know that some of you in the audience saw that slide and thought, is he calling me a pig? I wasn't, but I just want to call attention by use of that analogy that there are many words that we use routinely and we just don't think about. Yeah, it's possible to go overboard on this. It's possible to slip into Orwellian Newspeak. That is an actual possibility, but we need to be vigilant. We need to make sure that this is about compassion and not about being the language police. Now, I am completely out of time and I'm sure that Marie is back stage wondering when I'll stop talking. I am done. This is my reading list. And if you look at the bottom right corner of this slide, you'll see a link to my slides so that you can see these resources. I'm done, Marie. I'll stop talking. That was great, Rich. Thank you so much for that. I really like that that last slide with the different axes. It is important. It's definitely important. So are there any questions from the comments here? Honestly, just I'm sure you weren't looking at the comments. Everyone was talking about their feelings about the different points, how they, you know, manage some of the things staying away from destructive problems or conversations, more history, plenty of links in there. So definitely was generating a good conversation. I have a nice reading the transcript. Right. There's a nice quote here. Where is it? Listening to Rich and then reading the comments makes me happy. We are a great set of people. So I have to pat ourselves on the back a little bit for that. Well, Rich Bowen, is there anything you'd like to add? Any slides you didn't present? That's from Pingu. You want to want to do another presentation? Hi. There's there's so much more to say, but I don't think that that, you know, yeah, I think that this is the essence of it. Yeah, it's getting clapped. Great talk. Well, thanks again, Rich.