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 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 user better language at work when securing our systems and update our documentation appropriately. AWS, Github, and others have went 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 in our daily lives. Did you know the traffic light was invented by an African American? I learned that only through my pre-school child talking about after daycare!