October 2020 - Anti-Racist Language

October 2020

Featured Article

Departmental Leadership in Supporting Anti-Racist Language in Technical Literature

By: Clem Karl, Boston University

It happened in a most unexpected way. Like most campuses, ours was charged following the death of George Floyd and has been engaged in active anti-racist reflection and discussion since the summer. BU created a new Center for Antiracist Research and its director Ibram Kendi had led a day long period of reflection. We were all thinking about what role to play in reducing racism, increasing institutional diversity and supporting our under-represented minorities. In the midst of these developments one of our computer engineering students approached our department with a complaint about the textbook used for his logic design class. In particular, he was upset at the “master/slave” language used around flip-flops in the textbook. I raised the issue with our Departmental leadership group and reactions ranged from “of course it’s bad” to “well sure the words are there, but they don’t mean anything”, they are just technical terminology used for years and devoid of connection to race.

Like all good engineers I did more research and reflection. It turns out that this master/slave language is pervasive in technology ranging from mechanical control systems (think automotive brake systems) to software systems and programming languages. Even Wikipedia has a page on it all. I discovered this excellent article by Ron Eglash titled “Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature”[1] In it, Dr. Eglash notes that none of the patents for flip-flops actually use the terms master/slave until 1966, and that the engineer on that patent, who taught Digital Systems Engineering at MIT in the early 1960s said this terminology was not used in teaching flip-flop circuits at that time. Thus the terminology does not appear to be foundational to the flip-flop topic. In general, it seems that the Tech world is catching up to the issue and increasingly replacing these terms with equivalent, and in many cases, more precise and accurate alternatives including primary/secondary, primary/replica, parent/child, etc.

In our case, the student in question, with our encouragement, wrote to the publisher of the logic design book in question and pointed the issue out to them. The publisher quickly responded with a pledge to revise the text and review other publications of theirs. And there has been interest in getting learned societies to propose alternative, more precise terminology in this and similar cases.

The entire episode has been a learning experience for us that these issues can live quite close to home and just be taken for granted unless one works on them. In other areas of technology such language changes are already well underway. The Python programming language dropped “master/slave” in 2018. Microsoft’s GitHub, Red Hat, MySQL, are working to remove the terms now. Will awareness of these issues and the associated changes eradicate racist structures and patterns in academia by themselves? Of course not, but language carries meaning and there are plenty of unconflicted alternatives that can be used. I invite my fellow ECE Department Chairs to step back and look around your own curricula for similar challenges that are lurking in unexpected places.