Honestly, I'm not sure why "master" became the name in the first place. To a beginner, it seems unintuitive (at least when I first learned git, I would not have thought "master" actually described what master was). I hope something common like "main" is adopted.

(Not native English speaker, non-American here)

Master seems a perfect word to describe anything that is controlling or has authority over the other thing. Things can be a person, organization, device.

Slave seems like a perfect word to describe any concept related to objects that lack autonomy, are controlled or owned by something else.

Master/slave is very common idiom. I understand the issue of racist language, but words are context dependent. Surely racism can't spread trough language associations?

These are not racist language: “I’m slave of my passions”, “I’m master of my destiny”, “I have master degree.”, “He is master of his house.”, “Yes master“ (Star Wars), “Master Sergeant“.

But then using the word in github is somehow racist even tough it is misnomer. Master is not controlling anything, it's main or primary.

This is not racist language.

Repeating this claim as a fact does not help, quite the opposite. It just makes it sound like an extreme position and agenda.

"An effort to rename racist language in computer terminology"

This seems like a good thread to hijack for a second and complain about the default Ubuntu screencapture utility writing "scrot" into every file name, which is embarrassing to send to people and requires manual editing.