> So IMHO the focus should be on dropping racial connotations from colors.
Color identifies are generally bullshit. For example, what the heck is a white person? Are the Irish white? A 19th century WASP wouldn't think so. In fact, most Europeans who lived in their own ethnic communities in the US weren't white until about the mid-20th century. Incidentally, this is when the Great Migration began and these communities began to disintegrate. The WASPs began to feel threatened (though this is hardly unique to WASPs; cf. the Soviets, the Nazis, the CCP, etc), and so they engaged in bit of social engineering, identity theft, and deracinization. You were no longer Irish or German or Polish or Swedish or Lithuanian or whatever. You were now bland old generic "white". But wait a second. What is "white identity" and "white culture"? Do the Whites speak White? Of course not. This is what identity theft and imposed artificial identities are about. You are robbed of your identity and then told what your identity is by a ruling class that controls that identity. So you need to look to the ruling class to "know" who you are because they're no way to know or determine what whiteness is beyond what they make it mean. If you want to know what "whiteness" means, look no further than the organs and estates of power in this country. This is social engineering and control.
> Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race.
Exactly. Frankly, I don't think people associate "whitelist" with whiteness and "blacklist" with blackness. I don't, and people aren't monomaniacally stupid like that and that's not how we work. We can speak of the gorgeous black ebony of a piano or a raven-haired or a doe-eyed/black eyed beauty, or how handsome a shiny black tuxedo looks or how sleek a black Ferrari might look. Black tie formals appreciate the elegance that stark contrasts can have. We can also speak of someone looking pale as a ghost and sickly, whitewashing the truth, and so on. So it is patent nonsense that people think in these term. Maybe those people who believe this is the case are guilty of some kind of truly bizarre obsession where everything is racialized. Poor them. We judge things according to some normative understanding of what something ought or can be, not in abstraction.
(Some may allude to the historical use of dark colors to depict evil and white to depict good. This is, again, a highly selective reading and betrays the same inability to contextualize. The night is dark, darkness means inability to see, obscurity, concealment. Light reveals, makes things known. Is nature therefore racist? Should we accuse the sun, or light itself, of being racist? How parochial. Again, nobody of sound mind thinks this way and it is nothing less than the paranoia of insane academic bubble chamber ideologues.)