As far as I can tell, “whitelist” and “blacklist” don’t have a racist etymology. My stance is, “okay, I guess if they make you uncomfortable, we can spend our time and money to change these few cases in a bunch of documentation, configuration files, APIs, and variable names for the sake of your feelings…” However, I am worried that not grounding these changes in any kind of principled framework, apart from “at least one person feels uncomfortable”, is a bit risky for the people who have limited time and budgets to accomplish other things.
Edit: that was way too harsh. I guess there are “feelings” and feelings and if the reason is that you feel that the word “black” is associated with negative things and that’s tied up in the modern day continuing systemic racism, that totally makes sense to me. I guess for other words, the justification would have to be similarly impactful, and I just wonder how to go about judging that.
As far as I can tell, “whitelist” and “blacklist” don’t have a racist etymology. My stance is, “okay, I guess if they make you uncomfortable, we can spend our time and money to change these few cases in a bunch of documentation, configuration files, APIs, and variable names for the sake of your feelings…” However, I am worried that not grounding these changes in any kind of principled framework, apart from “at least one person feels uncomfortable”, is a bit risky for the people who have limited time and budgets to accomplish other things.
Edit: that was way too harsh. I guess there are “feelings” and feelings and if the reason is that you feel that the word “black” is associated with negative things and that’s tied up in the modern day continuing systemic racism, that totally makes sense to me. I guess for other words, the justification would have to be similarly impactful, and I just wonder how to go about judging that.