This comment is really the height of gaslighting. These D&I topics have never been an open dialogue, and it’s never been the intention for them to be. Nobody who objects to a D&I project feels as though their input is welcome, and those who are fool enough to voice their objections invariably suffer the consequences for it. These “open dialogues” are about proposing a change, with the implication (or by just explicitly stating) that any objection to the change is racist/sexist/whatever… and would victimise minorities.

The term whitelist is a legitimate piece of technical jargon, and has no racist origin. That is the end of any reasonable discussion on this topic. If you wish to litigate that point any further, that only direction that could possibly take is into wildly unreasonable territory. Renaming anything that people may feel is associated with other problematic concepts has no finish line. There’s an infinite quantity of problems you could invent using this approach, and all of the would be completely equal in their unreasonableness. The only way you could potentially limit this scope is to elevate the unreasonable feelings of one group over the unreasonable feelings of all other groups. Which is an exclusionary practice, and goes to show how subversive the use of language like “inclusion” is here.