I thought we weren’t supposed to call it “blacklist” or “whitelist” anymore?
If you believe that having "black=bad, white=good" connotations built into our jargon is harmful in some way, then yes, you should strive to use alternate terms.
If you don't think that's harmful, and you're forceful in defending "black=bad, white=good" as being too established and too inconvenient to change, that's when you're likely to get pushback.
Personally I've been trying to use "deny-list" and "allow-list" (with partial success – changing your jargon is hard). They feel a bit clunky, but I suspect that clunkiness will fade with time.
Regardless, this article is from 2011, so it predates the discussion.
But I have another extension that just modifies the format of some pages to make them easier on my eyes. It took experimentation for me to realize that items on the whitelist are modified, while those on the blacklist are not. My intuition told me whitelists are for sites that are good the way there are, and sites that are hard on the eyes should be put on the blacklist.
It's not the worst mix-up in the world, and perhaps many smarter than myself would have no such confusion, but I think it could be avoid with words that mean what they do. There's plenty of room in the extension configuration to put "apply to these sites" or "transformed", as well as "allow original format" or "unchanged."
Yes, there was never some contract that we all signed or some thing some majority of us formally voted that says "we're not supposed to call it a blacklist/whitelist anymore.
Just what some random groups decided and enforced at their own domains (companies, orgs, etc.).
It's also based on an American preoccupation with race issues, seeing everything through it's own guilt-ridden history, concerns not relevant to other parts of the world (where code is written and English is also spoken, as first or second language for IT).
The connotations of black/white s terms have nothing to do with slavery or blacks, the term blacklist was first used (recorded) in an English theater play, as the list of the enemies of the kind (black alluding to shady, dark motives, etc, not to skin color), and its common colloquial use in the 20th century was also not about blacks or had anything to do with slavery: it was the list where employees put union members, strikers, etc not to hire.
It's better for people in the US to concentrate on fixing actual racial issues (from incarceration rates and cop shootings, to school funding, redlining and loan access) than to play with words to pat itself in the back.
People all over the world have used black/white to certain things (sometimes the inverse too, e.g. in some asian cultures white is associated with death), and it has nothing to do with the US practicing slavery, seggregation, and racism to blacks.
We use those terms with some connotations for centuries before blacks were sold as slaves to pick your cotton, even at times when slaves where whites working for other whites (as in Ancient Persia, Greece, the Roman Empire, feudal times, and so on).