But then, political activism is about the only reason against replacing "whitelist", which unlike "submarine" is neither a technical term, nor common parlance, with the more explicit "allowlist". It's an obscure, relatively modern coinage as an antonym to the word "blacklist" which for most of its existence referred almost exclusively to people and was considered a judgement on their character. I've had to explain to native English speakers what a "whitelist" is intended to do before, never mind the majority of people using internet services who don't speak English as a first language. I suspect they'd have got "allowlist"...
I suspect that in a world where there actually was an issue with people getting upset by casual use of the word "submarine" we probably wouldn't have that much issue getting our heads around "undersea boat" (and that's despite "submarine" being a more universal word and the English language concept of a "boat" being pretty strongly wedded to the idea of small, probably open-topped vessels which sit on top of the water). Of course blacklist/whitelist has no etymological connection with race, but it also has no etymological connection or near-universally understood association with infosec or user preferences