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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

There's even a movement to replace the term "Blacklist" with a less problematic words such as denylist or blocklist. Of course, "Whitelist" is just as problematic - if not moreso! - and should be replaced with allowlist or safelist.

Edit: The etymology of these words have nothing to do with skincolor, Blackness or Whiteness.

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Although I agree with the thrust of your edit, I’d actually be okay with making the swap if a black person from an underprivileged background told me that terms made him uncomfortable. But somehow it’s always a white woman from a privileged background that’s insisting we say allowlist or Latinx.

The white savior industrial complex is an important brand influencer segment. This is significant emotional labor they perform for “the is it Poles?”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47245/the-cambridge-l...

No joke. I had a very Caucasian woman tell me why she was too “exhausted” to explain to me why America’s treatment of Muslims was abhorrent and damaging. I, an immigrant from a Muslim country who went to college in the south after 9/11, had possessed the temerity to say America had handled 9/11 with far more grace towards its Muslim population than Muslim countries would have done had the shoe been on the other foot, and praised George W. Bush’s handling of the issue. That was the wrong answer apparently.

Saying Y would be worse than X doesn't justify X.

Are you Muslim or just from a mostly Muslim country?

Many Muslims have said America's treatment of Muslims is abhorrent and damaging. Why should she listen to you over them?

But somehow it’s always a white woman from a privileged background

It's a pattern in part because of the way white women get socialized and the role they get assigned.

I'm not excusing it or saying it's okay. I'm just saying widespread patterns tend to be driven by larger forces.

I'm not going to say more than that because it tends to be a shit show to try to say anything about the whys and wherefores.

Yes, it needs to stop. Helping white women escape the role society assigns them would be a more effective means to address this than just pointing fingers and being blamey.

People talking about this want both terms to be replaced at the same time.

To believe otherwise is a willful victimhood fantasy.

Yet they will support an extreme swing of the pendulum. We need more than one simultaneous thought to guide us.

My company actually got into doing this. The only reason it eventually stopped is because it cost actual money to complete that change in one of the systems. All of a sudden, it was harder to justify that change. So it didn't happen. I get it though. We recently got inclusivity executive something or other. You gotta show you are doing something. Incidentally, how do you even get those types of jobs?

I wholly support “blacklist” being replaced with ”blocklist”, “denylist”, “exclusion list”, or anything else that is both more direct about the function and isn't a lazy use of a metaphorical reference to a centuries-long history of elite political and anti-labor (often both simultaneously) repression. (Ditto with “whitelist” which is itself a second-order reference to blacklisting.)

Just because something isn't specifically connected to race doesn't mean it is innocuous.

>Just because something isn't specifically connected to race doesn't mean it is innocuous.

No one said otherwise. Luckily, "blacklist" is innocuous, and the only ones calling for its replacement and removal are neurotic leftists.

Dragons breathe fire, and my family burned to death. For my safety, please change your username to something that won't trigger me, your username is not innocuous. I see your username and all I can think about is my family burning.

Just because something isn't specifically connected to race doesn't mean it is innocuous.

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