COMPUTER ENGINEERING: EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

摘要

The programming terms "master" and "slave" became commonplace in the years after the Second World War as a metaphor to describe the subordination of one electronic component or command to another. Ron Eglash, a University of Michigan professor who studies ethnomathematics, or the relationship between math and culture, tells The Boston Globe that it's unclear if the usage was racially motivated, but notes that the language of engineering can be boring and those terms made the concept of control easy to grasp. Roscoe Giles, a Boston University computer engineering professor and the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University, always found the metaphor "distasteful" and instead substitutes "boss" and "worker" in his classes. This summer, with Black Lives Matter protests erupting nationwide, one of his graduate engineering students, Santiago Gomez, 28, came across the offensive terms in a textbook and was galvanized to get them abolished. He persuaded textbook publisher Pearson to drop the metaphor from more than 600 print and digital titles and replace it with either "leader and follower" or "first and second." Similar efforts are underway in industry and professional societies. The IEEE, for example, is starting a process to review the language used in its standards, while software-developer platform Github is switching to more inclusive terminology. Gomez, whose letter to Pearson called master-and-slave terminology "an example of how systemic racism functions in America," says the publisher's move is an important step toward rectifying the problem, the Globe reports. But Eglash worries that these "cosmetic, tidying-up activities" give the tech industry an easy out, allowing it to sidestep deeper inequities, such as underrepresentation of women and African Americans or the focus on solutions that benefit corporations rather than communities. - T.G.