I'm very favourable to getting rid of blacklist. It's random whether it's an allow list or a deny list, and there are domain specific words you can use instead to make it really clear what the list does
it's less clear to non-native English speakers what the hell a blacklist is than what a deny-list is.
EDIT: the replies I received to this comment are pretty shocking to me. I'm not arguing for the removal of anything, I am only listing one issue with blacklist that deny-list doesn't have. Anything you're reading into my comment beyond that is your tribal identity projecting its insecurity.
I'm a non-native English speaker, and I must say that you are wrong.
Even forgetting that many languages have exactly the same construction ("black list") with the same meaning, the thing you do as a non-native speaker with an unfamiliar word is to look it up in a dictionary, or guess its meaning from the context, not try and run some inverse etimology on it.
I mean, for years I understood what "paste" meant (as in "copy and paste") and used that word without having any idea about "paste" being some sort of glue. I still have no idea where the word "parkway" comes from, but understand the word and use it. (If I were to guess from its parts I would arrive to something like a "garden path":))
1. By this logic, we should abandon most words in the English language, because non-native speakers might otherwise need to learn them. Somehow though, you've applied this logic only to the word "blacklist". And why should a language with its own literature and history abandon its own vocabulary?
2. The usual reason given for not saying "blacklist" is because of supposed racism. Your argument is a new one, and seems to have been produced post-facto. Your comment is sophistry.
Not really. English remains the most spoken language in our circles and it's immensely helpful because of that. What we can all do is to look for better names. Master/slave can be replaced by primary/replica, publisher/subscriber and a lot of others that offer narrower meanings and, therefore, are better names.
White is good because it's the colour of natural light. Black is bad because it's the colour of darkness, which is dangerous because you can't see. Children are afraid of the dark.
The fact that people's skin colour is sometimes described as white or black is a coincidence that doesn't relate to the origin of the word blacklist.
If people are offended by coincidences like this, it means that we won't be able to speak Spanish, Russian or Chinese. The Russian word for black (as in a black person) is negr; but note that this is not considered offensive in Russian.
Plenty of “black” compound words that are neutral to positive.
It’s not about the words, it’s about power. They want to force you to do what they say.. Even for something trivial like this, if they can force you to do use their language, they make a small win.
A few hundred wins later and they dictate what is acceptable language.
Your examples are actually supporting the argument. White lies are innocent, not so bad lies, much better than black lies. White washing is making something look better than it actually is, that is: make it look white = make it look better. And the only one that doesn't automatically use "white" as good is "white collar", but that is because here the distinction is between "white collar" and "blue collar".
Haha you’re right. I never thought about it this way, I just took words as whole, and these words are all negative (in my mind). Although technically you could say the same about “blacklist”, people want the same concept (blocking, which isn’t necessarily negative) but don’t want to associate it with race.
