Ethics of Terminology

Roscoe Giles, one of the longest-serving Black faculty members at BU, has encountered the master/slave terminology for many years. “I’ve been bothered by it all my life,” he said, noting that it also appears in other engineering contexts and even in photography. “I had come to see it as undesirable, but unavoidable.”

But, when Gomez emailed him with the idea to write the letter and asked for his feedback, Giles said he saw the matter in a renewed light.

“The letter reminded me I should have been more outraged by it,” Giles said. “Continuing encounters with an irritation can make you build up a callus. I had built up a callus for this language that I wish I hadn’t built up.”

“Historically, [the terminology] has been used pretty widely,” Giles added. “Its [appearance in the Pearson textbook is] not an exotic or unusual use of the term. It has always been very striking to me. In most of my courses, I try not to use [the master/slave terminology]. I’ll use boss/worker or main/subsidiary or something like that.”

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