Also not offensive: Black Friday, black holes, black beans, black tea, black-eyed peas, black gold (aka oil), Black Mirror, black swans.
> “Others pointed to the dualism between black and white as representing evil and good, concepts that have been around since the dawn of civilizations, long before racial divides even existed between humans.”
The supporters of the current terminology use this to bolster their argument, but I believe it’s also at the core of the argument against the use of terms like blacklist/whitelist. The idea is that the black vs. white = evil vs. good (like, MTG card colors) can “spill over” into dark skin vs. light skin = evil vs. good. This is an interesting article related to this effect: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-bad-is-black-...
Ok fine, I’ll take a weakly-held stance: this seems like a bit of a stretch, and distracts from the more serious ways in which systemic racism manifests itself. On the other hand, I see no need to become outraged—words fall out of favor all the time (go play with the Google n-grams viewer to see for yourself).
The former, nobody thinks about - see words like "tubular", "rad", "phat", etc. The latter is rather Orwellian, as it's about enforcing a behavioral change on people. People (at least the ones I know) generally hate this, especially in the West.
A: Is this thing bad or good, legal or illegal?
B: I think it's a grey area.
The black==bad is a fundamental feature of all humans. Black people also fear the dark and not the sun.