I'm sorry, but you've got it completely backwards. If you're doing a word association and the first thing you think of for 'black' or 'African American' is 'sla

I'm sorry, but you've got it completely backwards. If you're doing a word association and the first thing you think of for 'black' or 'African American' is 'slave', then yeah that's racist. But slavery in America (and we are talking about America here, Github is based in the US, not ancient Rome) was 100% connected with and built on top of notions of racial superiority. Addressing issues of racism today does require us to ignore or downplay racism in history.