I hear you Christopher. I personally am not on board with this either. And as an anarcho-communist politically who detests any form of authoritarian structures, I find this move to be misled in the pursuit of any actual liberation.
I wish the contributors here actually dealt with history critically, and studied critical race theory. I wish I could take this as anything other than merely a performative posturing to "look inclusive", but don't we see those things already in the activities of our enemies (Microsoft, Google etc.)? The sad fact is that, the critical disposition is really absent. I personally care more about that and not what name the branch has. Any system without enough internal criticism is bound to either dissolve or eventually form an authoritarian structure. I hope at least some of us can keep such a disposition. I cannot really give a crash course on critical (race) theory, but I'd end this mail with one of my favorite quotes from Frantz Fanon, one of the people who actually cared about liberation from racism, probably more than any of us: "I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. /.../ My black skin is not a repository for specific values. /.../ Haven't I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the Blacks of the seventeenth century? /.../ I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden. /.../ I do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world. /.../ Am I going to ask today's white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? /.../ I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. /.../ It would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the third century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. /.../ I find myself in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other." Frantz Fanon, "Black Skins, White Masks" (1952) On 18 February 2025 15:50:25 GMT, Christopher Howard <christop...@librehacker.com> wrote: >Personally, I believe the whole push to switch from "master" to "main" is >politically correct nonsense, and a waste of time. Obviously a "master" branch >in repository has nothing to do with slavery or political perspectives, but >DEI proponents have a compulsive desire to eradicate from society and language >anything that has some vague connection to what they find displeasing. > >If "main" is the default for new git repositories, I don't care and that is >fine with me, but I see no need to rename leading branches on any existing >projects. > >-- >Christopher Howard > Divya Ranjan, Mathematics, Philosophy and Libre Software
