About NIST's inclusive language guidance

The following comes from a Linkedin post by NIST, then USA National Institute of Science and Technology:

What do you want to say – and equally importantly, how are you saying it? Some word choices can result in unclear or even off-putting messages for your audience. When it comes to technical standards, NIST has new guidance to promote inclusivity. Some recommendations:

• Avoid terms such as master/slave that perpetuate negative stereotypes or unequal power relationships.
• Avoid identifying an individual’s gender unless necessary for comprehension, or using terms that assign a gender to inanimate objects, such as male/female connectors.
• Consider that biased terms, such as blacklist/whitelist, also may introduce comprehension issues.

Get your message across to ALL of your audiences. Learn more about the NIST inclusive language guidance NIST’s Inclusive Language Guidance Aims for Clarity in Standards Publications

My addendum

• Avoid conceiving a guideline which suggests that terms like master/slave, used with the explicit purpose of underlining the power unbalances between two automated actors in an engineering system, have specific racial connotations, targeted at specific ethnic groups. Such guideline would create the idea that masters/slaves still exists today, and are still represented by the same ethnic groups, so much that it is important to still protect salves from slavery by never suggesting that the slavery concept could still exist in any context.
• Avoid tracing a guideline which is totally irrespective of many foreing languages, with grammars giving genres to inanimate objects and concepts, like Italian and many latin-derived languages. Such a guideline would be highly discriminatory against non-English speaking people (today world’s Master language).
• Avoid publishing a guideline which attach racial meanings to obvious physical facts. For example the fact that white is something that reflects all colors making them all visible, and black something that absorbs all colors making them all invisible. This physical fact is quite obviously translated into a filter: the blacklist being the more secure by all points of view. Publishing a guideline suggesting that physical facts have racist implications, has racist implications.