If anyone remembers Lani Guinier and maybe even the controversy surrounding her nomination to be Asst. AG for Civil Rights, I actually read all her articles and the one that’s applicable was about the use of words - I’m paraphrasing because it’s been a while - that label minority persons and how that both categorizes them and takes away some human individuality … except the entire article was full of reference to “whites” and “them” and “they”. I found it amusing: I could understand the urge to talk about the use of language to put people in a box but there is no alternative to labels and she couldn’t resist or avoid using group labels to refer to the “others” in her examples. That’s one nature of language: it’s impossible to individualize unless we develop specific words for each person (and probably for what each person does)! I also found it amusing that she could isolate this form of speech as being somehow essential to the underlying racial/ethnic issues when, to me - and this is my point - if this form of language weren’t identified, then she and others would identify some other signifier of the problem. So with “master”, yeah it’s a word and every language has a bunch of words that identify groups and individuals in ways some might find offensive but really what people are doing is expressing an underlying issue.