What's hilarious to me is that I think the people who find there to be a problem with these words are the racist ones themselves. They are taking a word out of context and being offended by it out of context. They are the ones looking at a word and thinking negative racist thoughts.
When I use the word "master" or "blacklist" it has nothing to do with any old historical context or usage of the word. I am quite clearly using the word in a technical context as per the dictionary definition of the word. Anyone who thinks that is offensive is the true problem in my opinion.
That is what I believe as well. I am not that preoccupied with races to make such associations. In all fairness, I still have no clue what "blacklist" has to do with races or slavery, even after having been "shown" this association, because it makes no sense given the context.
There might be people out there who genuinely do not know what the term means in the context of CS/IT, but then instead of assuming that everyone using the term is racist, they should try to figure out the actual meaning.
Killing a child or a parent in the context of computer science is something completely different than... actually killing a child or a parent. :) I can imagine "just kill the child" being misinterpreted, but that can only be the case if someone takes it out of context. Once the context is known, there should be no confusion or mystery.
No, they are very much aware of the context. Most of these people are just bullies, who have found a new way to mask their toxic behavior in the name of a good cause.
I have seen bots, too. I remember there was a bot that sent pull requests to over 1000 projects if I remember correctly. All the pull requests involved changing words only, such as "blacklist" to "blocklist" or whatever. You know what is funny? Many of them were merged.
I just named something "blacklist" a couple of days ago. It has nothing to do with races, nor slavery. The only thing they have is a person in-between who connects the two because s/he is a troll, or because lacks context-awareness or whatever.
I do not enable them.