'master' branch is like a master recording, an original from which copies can be made off. I don't have a Master degree in English, but it feels someone is terribly confused.
"Whitelist" and "blacklist" are also terms that deserve attention, more so than "master branch".
The "master" branch is the "master" record. The official copy. The entertainment industry "remasters" their source recordings. The original Star Wars gets remastered frequently.
I don't think that the recording and entertainment industries are going to change these terms, because I don't think they're racially charged in the context in which they're defined and used. There's literally no parallel. In our industry, we have other suspect things called master, which is why it stands out.
In any case, I think it's impossible to rethink this decision now. Walking it back feels icky and political, and we should always err on the side of inclusion anyway.
The whitelist/blacklist thing is a bit of a no-brainer, that one should change. Master/slave is debatable, because it isn't actually discriminatory. But whatever, one for the debate. Master git branches are back in no-brainer territory as something that didn't need to change.
As a white man, I cannot tell if some black people are offended by that, but I hope not. I had never thought about racism when discussing technical matters using this terminology... until a few weeks ago.
What surprises me it that some people think that changing technical terms will change the lives of victims of racism.
This debate made me think again about a quote from some engineers from the erlang/OTP team:
"We were working on the R1 release of OTP when a group of us left the office and took the commuter train into Stockholm. We were talking about the ease of killing children, children dying, and us not having to worry about it, as supervisors would trap exits and restart them ... we failed notice the expression of horror on the faces of the old ladies sitting next to us "
Should we now rename child/parent relationship too, to please old ladies?
Why though, it has nothing to do with skin color. Black and white, grey area, there are lots of things involving these colors, but they aren't about skin color, they're about opposites. And there are plenty of other things including color, e.g. black hole, white vest, carte blanche, but they're not about skin color either.
Then advocates of this should also be campaigning to stop using yellow as the color to indicate warnings, since it's insensitive to Asian-Americans.
But we all know they aren't going to.
Slave is never used once in git documentation, never has been and never will be: https://git-scm.com/search/results?search=slave
Ultimately this is a digression; this change is being made not because of the intentions of the authors of git, but to be considerate of users of GitHub.
Which users?
That tweet is from the original creator who made "master" the default branch in git.