I work in a fairly small company, but if i think of all the things we'd have to change in our infrastructure to exclude all of those offending words (like Black- and White-Lists), we'd probably be busy for a couple of weeks.
Also, deny list and allow list are more precise terms anyway.
Are they? Black/whitelist feels way more natural to me. You can also say things like "blacklisted this ip" instead of "adding to the deny list" or something.
that these are stored in a particular data structure isn't the important part IMO
it doesn't reinforce the idea that black is bad and white is good, it was modelled around the idea that black is bad and white is good.
Because for humans black (dark) is bad and white (light) is good.
Black cats were considered a symbol of bad luck because they were invisible in the dark, not because they resembled black people.
You would get paid to implement more descriptive systems. Sounds like a good deal to me.