I agree with you – allow/deny is easier to understand anyway for global non-native speaker (which all open source projects are).

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.

I agree that'd be great, but between changing the world's use of black and white and changing our use of blacklist and whitelist as pertains to software, one is in our power and the other isn't. Who knows, maybe someone will even feel more welcomed in our profession as a result.

Why would one feel unwelcome? We just established the word has nothing to do with race.

What if we're whitelisting or blacklisting people for the privilege to attend an organized crime conference? Which is good? Which is bad?

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.

Okay, I guess if you're writing malware then you can feel free to carry on with whatever terminology you like. For the rest of us it is understood that a blacklist is untrusted and a whitelist is trusted, so why don't we just say that explicitly and do away with a culturally dependent metaphor that could offend or confuse?

"Trust" is overloaded in a CS context thus adding to, not reducing, cognitive load.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_system

Where does this whitewashing (err, denywashing) stop?

No a blacklist and whitelist has nothing to do with trust.

Blacklist simply means “allow by default except for things in this list” whereas whitelist means “deny everything except for what’s in this list”

A recommended read/watch where white is definitely bad: "a dry white season" by André Brink. Oscar for Marlon Brando in the movie version.