Their reasoning seems pretty clear "Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort." It's worth noting tha

Their reasoning seems pretty clear "Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort." It's worth noting that "privilege" comes from the Latin for "private law", which is to say a law that established a code of conduct for one class that was not applied to another. Typically, this took the form of exempting some people from the laws that bound everyone else. In other words, the life under conditions of privilege was far freer and and more forgiving than it was for everyone else. The result was a set of advantages that made it easy for those with privilege to maintain it, and difficult for those without privilege to acquire it. What's remarkable about this document is the way it illuminates the extraordinary number and range of ways in which privilege - and its attendant social ordering functions - can express itself. In other words, simply countering it, to say nothing of dismantling it, is a non-trivial task. Understanding privilege in this way also makes it easy to see why the very concept of "reverse racism" is so ridiculous. In essence, it's based on a profound misunderstanding of what racism is in the first place. It is not simply a matter of treating different people differently. It is about embedding race in a system of privilege, which is something you cannot do unless you have privilege in the first place (obviously, allowing those without privilege to define its benefits would defeat the whole purpose). In other words, racism is about propagating a deeply established social hierarchy of dominance and submission that is based on race. To the extent that "reverse racism" seeks to limit the power of these structures, it's a good thing. In any case, the problem is the continued existence of the unjust power structure, and not the fact that people pay attention to who does and does not receive its protection. In Western countries, privilege has generally meant straight, white, men, from well-off backgrounds making life much easier for each other while making it much more difficult for everyone else. Sure, there are exceptions. But they're few and far between, with their scarcity only serving to underscore the general rule. And while plenty of individuals who are a part of this class may find the structure distasteful, that's had limited effect on the structure itself, which remains largely dominant to this day. In any case, it's not going to dismantle itself, so it's up to the people who do want to do something about it to actually do something about it. Saying "we're not going to defend it, and given a choice, we're going to rule against it" is a good example. That may be very unsettling for some people, but understand this: if you're getting grief the problem is probably not that you're a straight, white guy. More likely, the problem is that you're treating other people like garbage in more ways than you can even imagine, and doing so habitually because your privilege allows you to get away with it. And yes, a place that explicitly says "your privilege is not respected here" can be a tricky one for some people to navigate. If you're not much of a jerk to begin with, it isn't a big deal. But if you're a deep-fried, hard-boiled asshole who cannot even imagine how to treat others with a suitable measure of civility and respect, yes, you're going to suffer.