Granting that premise, consider that words do not exist in a vacuum. What pain is it to you to promote a more inclusive atmosphere?
You’re right. They exist in the context in which they’re used. In this case that context is as a technical term that has no association at all to any racist ideas. I would advise you to consider that you do not exist in a vacuum, and perhaps you should reconsider your anti-social impulse to police other peoples’ use of innocent words. Forcing people to remove words from their vocabulary because they remind you of some upsetting concept is not inclusive at all. It is by definition exclusionary.
Haha, ok buddy.
If you want to be more inclusive, perhaps you could go to the effort of understanding the vocabulary of my trade and the meaning of those words, rather than try to prevent me from using them. Because I’m feeling very excluded by you right now. Do you care about the lived experience I’m having right now? If not, why?
The term whitelist is a legitimate piece of technical jargon, and has no racist origin. That is the end of any reasonable discussion on this topic. If you wish to litigate that point any further, that only direction that could possibly take is into wildly unreasonable territory. Renaming anything that people may feel is associated with other problematic concepts has no finish line. There’s an infinite quantity of problems you could invent using this approach, and all of them would be completely equal in their unreasonableness. The only way you could potentially limit this scope is to elevate the unreasonable feelings of one group over the unreasonable feelings of all other groups. Which is an exclusionary practice, and goes to show how subversive the use of language like “inclusion” is here.
While the direct impact of changing a term might seem insignificant, it's about mutual respect and understanding. This isn't language policing, but sparking awareness. Your feelings are valid, your input is welcome. Let's keep talking, even amidst disagreements. Progress lives in dialogue, not silence.
A case could also be made for people who aren’t aware of the context: are they confused because the terms aren’t familiar? Does their own bias influence them to understand the meaning and infer white = good, black = bad? If so, is that not more reason to change the words? Shouldn’t we move away from language that associates good and bad with colors that are often used as tools of division?
Regardless of who the audience is, the terms equate a color to either being good or bad and it’s kind of silly when terms like allowlist and blocklist are immediately parseable into what they mean.
I don’t particularly care other than if there’s some tiny segment who feels the terms could be even remotely offensive, and we can all agree that regardless there are better terms, why not use them?