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Comment by Tostino | Hacker News Reader

This is where I'm at too. Totally on board for retiring the use of master/slave for primary/replica. But like you said, whitelist/blacklist didn't have anything to do with race. I just don't see why it's relevant at all to the conversation when we are talking about terms or names that may be racially insensitive. It's on you to bring up evidence for why a phrase is insensitive. I've yet to see any.

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The argument is that the underlying meaning of whitelist being “ok” and blacklist being “not ok” implies some bias based on color. It wasn’t long ago that there were “whites only” and “no blacks allowed” signs throughout the US. For foreign speakers using a more descriptive name like allowlist and denylist is a benefit as well.

I mean I am not going to fight kicking and screaming as language evolves. I am also for descriptive names like allowlist/denylist. I just don't see the argument for changing that phrase it in the same light as I see the argument against master/slave.

These references have everything to do with presence and absence of light, not race.

We are diurnal so we mostly see light as a positive (daylight, when we are awake), and darkness as a negative (night when we are asleep, and have evolved to be more wary of a situation where we can’t see well).

My argument for all this is, instead of actually vilifying the colors themselves which are meaningless, why don’t we stop referring to humans as white and black? Where’s that debate? Because those words are meaningless. Neither are white nor black. They’re brown. We are all different shades of brown.

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