There are many practical reasons to do this, I just wasn't clear on the race-related reasoning for blacklist/whitelist, as these words don't have those etymologies.
The color black is associated with many non-racial things that we do deem negative, things like death with black clothes at funerals, things like the darkness being the absence of light (sunlight is brighter/whiter), being blinded, where we do mostly see black. None of those things are racial, what should we do about all those?
Perhaps a better change is to stop associating our skin color with those words which are clearly inaccurate, and serve absolutely no useful purpose.
Note that in this unsavory example there is zero ambiguity! The whitelisted will hang with other mobsters, clearly, plotting evil and mayhem all the while.
The terms have bupkis to do with good and bad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_system
Where does this whitewashing (err, denywashing) stop?
Blacklist simply means “allow by default except for things in this list” whereas whitelist means “deny everything except for what’s in this list”
And according to the Wikipedia (and the Oxford English Dictionary) [1], it seems like blacklist came about something like 400 years ago in England. It doesn't seem to be related to race.
Is there a movement that is tying those terms to race? Would love to see some links about it. Because master/slave seems like a much more obvious set of terms that we can and should get rid of (and replace with leader/follower, primary/secondary, etc).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting