"Light gray" is easy to misspell as "light gay", e.g. "light gay knight takes dark gay bishop". IMHO, it's better to use "wine" (w) and "blue" (b) as colors.

If you use English rather than American, you have "light grey" which is less ambiguous.

And attack and defense to moving forward and backward. And I guess we should abolish winning and losing while we are at it

Chess already has the terminology of light squares and dark squares, so adopting that for the pieces too would add confusion and awkwardness.

For example “black’s light squared bishop” would become “light’s light squared bishop”.

It would still be light-skinned pieces vs. dark-skinned pieces.