The developers of the MySQL database have announced that they are going to replace terminology such as master, slave, blacklist, and whitelist .
In a blog post , the MySQL team stated that they do not want to use these terms in the database source code , and will replace them with new ones such as source, replica, blocklist, and allowlist , respectively.
The group, which operates the second most popular database engine on the internet according to DB-Engines, has not explained how it came to the decision to change the terminology.
Of course, MySQL's move comes at a time when many other companies and open source programs have begun removing the same terms from their code bases, citing it as "harmful and harsh language" that promotes racial discrimination.
Two days after the developer team's announcement, Twitter engineers also announced similar plans to replace the terms in internal tools and open source programs.
According to the company, Twitter technicians are going to remove nine sensitive terms, specifically: whitelist, blacklist, master/slave, grandfathered, pronouns, man hours, sanity check, and dummy value.
Other companies that have recently pledged to make the changes that MySQL is making include GitHub, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Ansible, Splunk, Android, Go, PHPUnit, Curl, OpenZFS, OpenSSL, and JP Morgan.
This trend of replacing terms took off due to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which was sparked by the death of George Floydon May 25.
The main goal of this effort is to make technology products and IT environments more friendly to people of color. Some members of the technology community have called this move a "shallow and useless action," and they do not consider it helpful for people of color and reducing racism.
It should be noted that work published in academic journals has been arguing for some time that the constant use of terms with racial roots intensifies racism.
