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Antiracism in Action A STUDENT’S OUTRAGE PROMPTS PUBLISHER TO REMOVE TRADITIONALLY USED RACIST LANGUAGE PHRASINGS FROM ENGINEERING TEXTBOOKS
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SANTIAGO GOMEZ
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or decades, engineering textbooks have termed the relationship of a device to others it controls as “master and slave.” In recent years, many attempts have been made to change the language and its racist connotation, but success has not been universal. A Boston University computer engineering grad student is setting about to change that. Santiago Gomez was so perturbed when he encountered the terminology in a textbook in Professor Roscoe Giles’ (ECE) Logic Design course that he wrote to the publisher, Pearson, and asked that it be changed. His letter prompted Pearson to stop distributing the book while the text is revised, to review its other publications and replace the term throughout its catalog and to begin contacting standards bodies to stimulate broader changes. “The use of the ‘master/slave’ metaphor to describe the phenomenon of combining two [circuits] is abhorrent,” Gomez
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SPARKING INNOVATION
ZAMAN NAMED GUGGENHEIM FELLOW
Gomez’s letter struck a nerve not only at the publisher, but within the College of Engineering as well.
wrote. “As a Latinx student of computer engineering, I request that you update your terminology to prevent further disruption to the learning experience and to take a concrete step towards dismantling systemic racism within engineering.” After praising the engineering content of the book, Gomez added, “The ‘master/slave’ . . . terminology proved detrimental to my learning environment. It reminded me that Black people’s presence in the sciences is not fully respected. This issue can be remedied by updating the term to reflect current understandings of race in America.” Gomez’s letter struck a nerve not only at the publisher, but within the College of Engineering as well. Upon learning of it, Dean Kenneth Lutchen and Electrical & Computer Engineering Department Chair Professor W. Clem Karl not only got behind Gomez’s effort, but reached out to the national engineering community to make sure engineering leaders were aware of the need to make the change. “Historically, it’s been used pretty widely,” says Giles of the master/slave terminology in explaining electronic switches > E N G I N E E R FA L L 2 0 2 0
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