Like, I suspect some of the employees involved in this change also volunteer with organizations, they also donate money to organizations, they also make other changes in their personal life, right? Maybe not all of them. Maybe some of them wake up and think "Social justice is really important to me so I'm going to do an empty virtue signal and then nothing else, wow I'm great". Even if that were true it's not super obvious what the concern is here -- okay, so maybe someone involved in this change could be a better person and could be using their energy more effectively? And? Surely there's a better use of my energy and yours than replying to a patchnotes post on hacker news to get mad about a one word change in a changelog of an email client, and yet here we are.

About half of my post was talking about how symbolic things, while not a substitute for concrete things, are part of making changes, and how often times tackling problems with a combination of the most urgent issues and the easiest to fix issues is normal, so it's weird that the reply would be "Symbolic things just substitute for concrete things and this issue is easy, not urgent". Like, yes, I've already considered your perspective here, that's why I replied to begin with?

Why instead of changing tech wording affecting every dev worldwide who does not care about american pseudo social justice, just do not call dark er skin „black“ and brighter skin „white“?

I mean still more people are afraid in the absence of light, hence the dark, than otherwise. And „white“ is often associated with clean, pure. There are psychological effects we can‘t just ignore.

Better just stop associating this pink skin with „white“ and darker skin with „brown“ or „black“.

I mean I still have to see a „white“ person and a „black“ person in real life.

For god‘s sake. Stop finding problems where there are none. Corporate trolling has reached the next level.

Using 'light' for 'good' which mostly derives from daylight, the sun, daytime etc. and darkness for 'bad' etc. might be the most ancient human metaphor, probably dating back to the time we could tell stories. Our first religion, in Egypt, the Sun was God and the God of the 'Dark Underworld' was the bad guy.

Moreover, it doesn't really have connotation with respect to skin colour.

The important, 'hard' part to social activism is context and nuance and also to understand that not all actions which may have some threadbare logic make sense or actually help.

However, I'm also somewhat annoyed by these kinds of changes, mostly because I would never have associated the "black" in blacklist with the skin colour until someone started pointing it out as an issue. While some terminology might be actually problematic, from my point of view there was never any problem with the word blacklist until someone started pointing it out. Now there is.

Once you make enough noise about an association like that, the association will certainly be there for more and more people even if it weren't there before. The problem kind of creates itself.

I'm fairly sure many Americans are understandably rather sensitive and sore about skin colour and racial justice right now. I'm not from the US, so depending on where you're from, this might make a difference in perspectives.

I'm also white and of the ethnic majority in my country, so I certainly don't see all the issues that minorities, immigrants or other ethnic groups might face. If it turned out that the word "blacklist" (to give an example) had been seen as an actual issue all along by a significant proportion of black people in my cultural environment or in most of the world, I wouldn't oppose the change. But if it hadn't been previously associated negatively that way, then creating that association and making a fuss about it has actually created a problem (or at least made one much bigger), not solved one.

While changing a term might not be that big of a thing practically, having to react to something you think shouldn't be an issue in the first place can be annoying out of principle. A social dynamic where you need to go along just because someone else sees a potential problem can also be annoying. My guess would be that the majority of people who are annoyed by these kind of changes are annoyed because of something along those lines.

Once you push something that sparks that kind of a reaction in people hard enough, you get people annoyed, and if you then push more, you get them more annoyed.

As for changing the culture, I'd rather like to see people getting much less neurotic about ethnicity and race rather than more so. I facepalmed hard when I read that, according to some people, the "ok" sign had become problematic because some far-right people had started using it, and that it should be avoided. I think that was an absurd stance; if you stop using an otherwise innocuous sign because someone else started using it for a bad purpose, you end up emphasize that new, bad association. (In that case you'd also kind of let the far-right people win, which makes it even more absurd, but that's not directly relevant here.)

The world is full of associations you can make, including ones with colour that matches someone's skin or religious symbol or any number of things. I've noticed that people are more prone to seeing connections, both in terms of reacting to actual ones as well as making less significant or spurious ones, when they feel more sensitive about related issues. It's no wonder if many (especially) Americans are currently trying to spot even the slightest racial issues and want to change the culture to get rid of them.

I'm just not sure I agree with that approach, or with the idea that it's "justice" or the only way to go. Rather than seeing a cultural change where we're so sensitive to racial issues that we try to see every potential negative connotation imaginable and get rid of them, I'm much prefer to see change towards a world where people don't feel the need to see all of those.