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Comment by musingsole | Hacker News Reader

So...are we going to just ignore the massive elephant in the room with people of a certain skin pigmentation pointing at anything and declaring it "colored"?

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The use of "colored" to describe the hue of an object predates its use to describe certain skin pigmentations by several hundred years.[1] After the second use was invented the former still stayed common, eg in "colored pencils", "colored clothing", "colored contact lenses", etc.

If you allow any term which has ever been used in a racist manner to be considered offensive you give enormous power to racists. They get to DoS attack your language by using whatever they want as slurs. I don't like empowering racists.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/colored

Yeah... I find this entire conversation pretty unpleasant--to the point where I haven't really wanted to ever interact with it directly, despite having tons of opinions on async/await due to my usage of either that specific feature or more generic related constructs (coroutines, monads) in many languages now (just not Rust)--as it isn't even like "colored" is being used in some happy way: things are always apparently somehow bad because they are "colored" :/, and I pretty much never hear the word "colored" used to talk about anything other than people (and, occasionally, functions). I realize a bunch of people are going to jump on me and say "I don't mean that", and I am not claiming you are: it just causes this continual looming mental state, as the word itself is so horribly weighted now.

Perhaps this discussion could be a opportunity to use the wording in a neutral fashion, letting yourself be okay with consciously and honestly using it, fighting against that looming feeling of unease?

That is, if your issue with this wording is only that it's subjectively, personally unpleasant to you for inner reasons, and not that you see it as actively harmful.

The issue I noted is that most of the discussion surrounds an assumption--one that I happen to hold neither for people nor functions--that "colored" things are inherently bad, and that we have to defend the lack of badness of colored things... if you can't see why having to sit inside of that terminology cluster would make someone who separately has to spend a lot of time in arguments about race relations uneasy, I fear for your empathy :(.

I prefer calling a graph "colored" rather than "with a labeling of the graph’s vertices with labels such that no two vertices sharing the same edge have the same label". Sometimes my graph being colored will be a problem, sometimes it will be a good thing.

Note that is just a parallel with colored functions, the "colored" word does not mean the same thing here (the meaning of "colored" in graph theory has little to do with the one used in programming).

Nonetheless, if I think that using this word is upsetting to some group of persons, whether I understand their reaction or not, I try to avoid using it. On the Internet it's difficult, because we're addressing ourselves to a very large potential audience.

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