Newsletter #16: Black History Month And The Language We Use In Tech ?
This entire month, I didn’t mention anything about Black History Month, so let me fix that.
Today, I released a new episode of Getting Into Infosec with a good friend Betsy Bevilacqua. Betsy is of African descent, and one of the things she mentioned in our conversation was how the use of “master” and “slave” (often referred to as Databases) shocked her as she was getting into tech.
Words such as “white-list” or “black-list” have an impact on others, and we’ve become desensitized to it. Let’s make an effort to use better language at work when securing our systems and update our documentation appropriately. AWS, Github, and others have already started going through the process (AWS has much more to go, given their size).
Today is the last day of Black History Month, but it doesn’t mean we should not celebrate it every day or be cognizant of it in our daily lives. Did you know an African American invented the traffic light? I learned that only through my pre-school child talking about after daycare!
This article was previously posted in the Newsletter.
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