Comment by raganwald
11 years ago
My experience is this:
Some time ago, I wrote a post about CoffeeScript. As you may know, CoffeeScript is a whitespace-specific programming language.
I am black, and there is a small cultural wiggle-room when it comes to black people making fun of colour-based cultural issues. So I thought I could get away with calling my post "White Power."
The response was immediate and scathing. Regardless of whether I was personally offended by my title, it was put to me that my title was inappropriate to go sailing round the front page of Hacker News, &c.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but you know what? These things are about how people react, not what was on my mind at the time. There is room for debate when people are doing these things specifically to provoke debate, as one finds in art and drama. But in this case, I was not an artist trying to make a point about culture, I was writing a blog post about CoffeeScript.
I changed the name, I think I renamed it after a Mondrian composition. A few people continued to rag me about it, but in time people forgot the name but continued to productively discuss CoffeeScript.
In any event, I feel for the authors. We all make our little jokes, and sometimes they land with a resounding thud. The problem, of course, is that unless we are artists provoking people into thinking about culture, these discussions are a distraction from the good work we're trying to do.
So the right thing to do as a developer is change the name and move on. If it is changed, the good things in this library will live on long after people have forgotten the rhetoric expended on the choice of name.
It would be a shame if the library is remembered for its name instead of its functionality.
Oh oh! Did you really just say "A few people continued to RAG me about it"? I know you think you are very language sensitive and not a mysoginst. But to use the word RAG!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rag
So how do you plan to repent! First beg for forgiveness until everyone agrees you have begged enough. Second make some pledge for the future. Of course you will never use that word again but how about donating money to a charity or hiring some women. Third and most important think twice before you accuse anyone ever again of saying something offensive because it might have been a simple mistake.
Maybe we could all be a little more gracious and assume the best of our fellow human beings. I think life could be a lot more pleasant for all of us. We might even be able to get more good done too.
I was basically done with this thread, but your comment is sufficiently interesting.
Compare two programmers. One believes that code must be perfect right out of the gate or else it is very embarrassing. The other believes continuous iteration is the normal state.
If presented with a major design challenge ("This UX doesn't work at all for people using screen readers"), I posit that the first developer is motivated to explain why the code as it stands is a good idea ("Those users aren't our market.") The first programmer views the idea of being wrong as deeply embarrassing, and wants to avoid feeling shame, or weakness, or whatever it is that involves saying "I was wrong."
The second programmer makes changes and carries on without worrying about it.
And so it is with a word. If you are deeply embarrassed at the notion of having to change, you make up all sorts of reasons why you are right and the people pointing out another way are wrong.
Whereas if you believe that development is all about iteration, you make the change and move along.
I am the second kind of writer. Many times I have blogged something, been called out about some technical or social point, and simply edited my posts. To me, iteration is a sign that things are working properly.
So... If HN allowed me to edit my comment to remove a word I now know is inappropriate, I would do so without worrying about it. I wish more people would take the same attitude: "Oh, this may make things inaccessible for someone? Let's change it and move on without drama just as we change our code and move on without drama."
I don't think this is accurate, in British english at least. Dictionary.com shows the etymology as unknown in the sense of to scold or to tease, but it gives the date as 1790 to 1800. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rag?s=t
It's usage as a synonym for tampon is show in word usage as dating from the 1930s.
I don't think it's remotely fair to assume it could be taking in the above context as derogatory towards women.
So how do you plan to repent? ;)
To play devil's advocate for a moment, we should also remember that sometimes (not always, but sometimes) people do have a choice in what they're offended by, and how they react to those feelings of offence. A lot of the people in this thread aren't even saying that they find it offensive personally, but that they feel that they ought to find it offensive on behalf of other people, which is very much a conscious decision on their part. If you react to the mere fact that some people complain about something without considering whether they might be wrong, you'll self-censor unnecessarily. And that makes it more difficult for others to resist self-censorship later.
The thing is, I don't think 'bro pages' are offensive. More than that, I don't think that they should be offensive. Are we seriously saying that we should attempt to avoid using any words, even in metaphors or puns, that might ever remind someone of a person stereotypically assumed to be annoying? Really? This feels like linguistic bikeshedding from people who, having realised that words have the power to offend, have set out to find offence where not only was none intended but where it could only be found by actively construing the speech as offensive. It's a massive piece of WWIC[1], driven by an attempt to appear more sophisticated and culturally aware, which massively exaggerates the potential harm caused in order to make a case that someone else (but never the critic) should have behaved differently. Instead of accepting that no harm was meant, and acknowledging their own free choice to decide whether to interpret something as harmful, they're claiming that the words they see are simply inherently wrong and must be changed.
Now, I should attach some massive caveats to the above. Some speech is inherently offensive. We know it's offensive because we can all close our eyes and imagine the worst things we could say to someone. There's almost no innocent use of such speech, although context, intent and consent are important. Such speech has no place in civilized discourse and HN is, for the most part, civilized discourse. 'Bro' is not such speech. 'Bro' can be amusing, annoying or neutral. It can make people smile, frown or feel indifferent, as can many other words in the dictionary. Naming things[2] is hard enough without the restriction that the name can never, ever, be interpreted negatively by someone trying very hard to do so.
[1] http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html [2] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
Your point has been raised elsewhere in this thread as well as many, many times in the last fifty-plus years when debating the effect of language on exclusion. I don't think I can add something new to the debate, so I'll direct you to do some research and find out why people do not accept your argument as axiomatically true.
Furthermore, the point that you're replying to says little about whether 'bro' or even 'white power' is offensive, it says that the debate about 'white power' was a distraction to a point about CoffeeScript.
And thus, my advice to the project authors is to change the name. Agree or disagree with whether it's offensive, it wasn't written to provoke you and I into discussing exclusionary language, it was written to help people be more productive.
The name works against that. Fair, unfair, what's the difference if your goal is to make people more productive?
I agree about the distraction. And I am not saying that nobody can ever complain about offensive language. What I am saying is that there are two parties in any disagreement and it cannot always be the case that the person who speaks first is always wrong and the person who judges their speech is always right. Sometimes people take offence for bad reasons, or in bad faith, and they create just as much of a distraction as those with legitimate complaints. So we cannot say that the mere existence of a distraction should cause the author/creator to change their product in order to avoid further distraction.
There needs to be some commonly-accepted understanding of what constitutes legitimate grounds for offence. You appear (though I don't think this is what you really mean) to be saying that anything that is found offensive by someone capable of causing a distraction over the issue should be accepted as such and removed.
To be honest, 'bro' is not an important word to me. But I worry about what it means if we can't use even such a silly word, as a fairly cheesy pun, without it causing such controversy. It feels like rather than bringing people together and making them more tolerant, discussions like this are just dividing people, over what is really a pretty trivial thing. Are we all so desperate to tell each other how to think and act that we can't let a silly pun be just a silly pun? Do we have to accept that even perfectly reasonable people, capable of giving good reasons for their actions (such as your blog post title) ought to have to self-censor rather than ask others to take the thing in the spirit it was intended? A little charity on the part of the critics would be nice.
Thank you Raganwald. You are comment #500 on this page, I've read them all with an angry feeling, and you are the first one who touches me.
You've made a decisive point in a 500-comment HN flamewar. Congrats.
>I thought I could get away with calling my post "White Power."
See, you just gained respect from me. I suppose it's all about the community in the end. If you linked that article on /g/ or /prog/ it probably would have resonated.
It's too bad most people are such slaves to political correctness.
Most _north americans_. This is a uniquely north american phenomenon, let's hope this cancer doesn't spread worldwide.