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Comment by flixic | Hacker News Reader

> In our technical work we use ‘allowlist’ and ‘blocklist’ instead of ‘whitelist’ and ‘blacklist.’ That’s because of the origin of these terms, with white being seen as ‘good’ and black being seen as ‘bad.’

This is one of these times where I'm confused about my own thinking, and am seeking advice "what should I think?". I think "allowlist" and "blocklist" are actually clearer, but I also struggle to accept that white/black, or light/dark cannot be used as general symbols for good/bad.

Edit: this reddit question and a lengthy answer talks about the "origins" -- they are not racial, and consistently meant allow/block: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/866ynp/what_...

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This is veering off topic but it's too good not to link Mohammed Ali on the words 'black' and 'white':

https://vimeo.com/139167005

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueDbCmG3iu4

He must have been doing those riffs a lot back then. What a master communicator and performer. He reminds me of Dylan's comic side.

Coming back to the topic, if you watch that youtube link to the end, it's interesting how different his recommendation is from 'allowlist' and 'blocklist'. He's not suggesting that whiteness and blackness be taken out of words and replaced with awkward, prudish constructs that no one would otherwise use. Instead he wants positive use of 'black' words: "Rich dirt is black dirt, strong coffee is black coffee". It's a different approach and he expresses it in such a simple and funny way. Of course this was of the moment in the late 60s (black pride).

Historically, white/blacklist did not have racial origins, but history is always happening. The original intent of a word can be erased by its proximity to new taboos and new circumstances, and in this case, white/black have been racialized.

See also: the disappearance of the words "niggardly" and "feck" from common English usage, or how Thais are uneasy using the word "fuk" (gourd, pumpkin) [0]

[0] https://sci-hub.tw/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808190.013.10

In our own industry, too, "master/slave" being gradually replaced by "primary/replica", "primary/secondary", etc. There was a lot of similar red-top-style complaining about "political correctness gone mad!" in the early days of that change, too. Now the new terms are totally unremarkable, and it's a real surprise to encounter the old.

As you say, history is always happening. My days of talking about "whitelists" and "blacklists", modulo the occasional slip as I start modifying my lexical habit, are done.

Thanks for the reminder of this. In the last release of my software, we renamed all the "slave" objects to be "masters", without any real thought to the connected social implications.

Honestly, I'm always for making language more inclusive/progressive, but this seems a bit over the top. I always thought of white/black meaning good/bad, respectively, as a natural consequence of people finding light good and darkness, well, bad. It's seen in the Bible, it was probably a direct consequence of darkness being more dangerous. Nothing to do with skin color.

This is a late reply admittedly, but as a white guy (who has had conversations about this terminology) my rule of thumb is to defer to the people who are hurt/historically marginalized.

It doesn't matter to me what the origins of these terms are. As the phrase goes, intent is not impact.

Who am I to tell someone that they shouldn't feel a certain way? I totally used to be "that guy", but have since realized that it's not about what I think.

I mean, really--if some "innocuous" (to me) word hurts someone, why wouldn't I just avoid saying it. It's literally the least I can do. Not saying it's going to fix systemic racism by itself but it seems pretty thoughtless to continue to use language that people have identified as (for lack of a better word) problematic.

Similar issues have confounded me for years. And I've come to believe that a consistent strawman and Catch-22 can be found in political correctness: If we agree to use the substitute words, we admit the original words were designed to segregate and that we used them to that end. If we don't agree to the substitute words, we prove the original words were designed to segregate and that we will use them to that end.

Most of these claims are bait. The goal isn't for the person asserting them to strike meaningful change in our understanding of the issue. They want to appear informed because they feel protected from criticism over their individual culpability. An anecdote: I had a friend who spent years patronizing white people she knew over their "ignorance" on the disproportionate impact of domestic abuse on black and Hispanic women. One evening, she flippantly described them as "too ghetto to know 'wuz good'..." So, all that talk and insistence, and she was the only person in the room with that opinion.

I think of whitelist/blacklist as emphasising the binary aspect of it (i.e. it's black and white, on/off, allow/deny, not shades of grey)

Using code blocks like this is unreadable without left to right scrolling in the viewport on mobile.

Updated. I wish HN had proper blockquote formatting.

Or.. just fixed their mobile layout? Code format on mobile only takes up like half the comment width for some reason.

">" prefix is perfectly sufficient without relying on additional parsing + styling. Worked in email and forums and usenet for decades.

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