Only if you're pretending we were all learned English yesterday. "White list" is an older more established term, and that familiarity makes it easier to understand. Self-describing terms don't aid communication if they're replacing old terms that everybody already understood anyway.
An example, "submarine" and "undersea boat". The latter is self-describing, while the former is vague. A submarine.. what? 'Submarine' alone seems to be an adjective that means 'under the ocean'. But what is under the ocean? A submarine cable? A submarine crab? "Undersea boat" is self-describing; what is underwater? A boat.
So is "undersea boat" a better term? It self-describes well enough that English speakers with no knowledge of German should be able to figure out what it means easily. But does that mean it's actually a better term? No, in the context of English it isn't a better term, because everybody already knows what a 'submarine' is so this term's failure to self-describe is irrelevant. Already knowing what a word means is always easier than being able to puzzle out what a word means by seeing that it describes itself.
Most words don't self-describe anyway, and even when they do, the words they self-describe with aren't self-describing themselves. What is a 'list' anyway? That doesn't self-describe. Should we replace it with "ordered-collection-of-things"? None of those words self-describe either! The adoption of this word isn't really about self-description, self-describing words just isn't something we [english speakers] prioritize. It's political activism based on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.