As of now, it is called whitelist/blacklist in PiHole [0]. Maybe it will change, maybe it will not, but there is already a place to fight that battle [1] and it is not HN.
If the terms whitelist/blacklist are hurtful to some people because of all the racial baggage we've applied to the words white and black, why not switch to allow/deny instead?
Using allow/deny is more explicit and doesn't rely on the benign cultural associations with the colors black and white.
The choice of colors used here is arbitrary. For example, one could just as easily use green/red in reference to traffic signal colors. Ask yourself, would it bother you if we used blue and pink for allow and deny? What if we used blue or white as synonymous with deny?
Two good reasons exist to change our habits, basic manners and clarity.
I'm sure I'll use the terms blacklist and whitelist from time to time out of accumulated habit. But there's no reason for me to cling to those terms. Being gently reminded to use objectively clearer terminology shouldn't engender hostility on my part. I try not to be an unpleasant person, part of that is when someone tells me my behavior has a negative impact on them, I try to listen to what they say and modify my behavior--while actually effecting change can be hard, the underlying concept is pretty simple.
There is a real cost to changing APIs/documentation/UIs. My experience talking to black (one African, one European) coworkers is their reaction is "That's the problem you're going to fix?". When the company does a companywide initative to remove "problematic" terms from APIs/documentation, but doesn't stop funding of politicians who support voter suppression that predominantly affect black people in real practical ways, that bemusement can even turn to offense as they feel placated.
Of course, my coworkers don't represent all black people, and especially wouldn't claim to represent African Americans, but if even black people can hold this opinion, are you surprised others don't see this as worth the effort to change?
> There is a real cost to changing APIs/documentation/UIs.
This is an OSS project. If someone cares enough about it, they should submit a (non-breaking) patch along with a patch for the documentation. There are no costs to people who don't find it a valuable change.
> My experience talking to black (one African, one European) coworkers is their reaction is "That's the problem you're going to fix?".
Obviously this isn't fixing any of the fundamental issues, but it does bother some people. My preference is to respect the people who have problems with it. An easy policy is to simply avoid creating new software which uses that terminology and to accept any patches which fix it. That way the people who feel the change is important bear the burden of the cost (which is likely small some thing like this).
Whitelist/blacklist have their origins in terms from the 1400s and nothing to do with race (they have to do with criminality). Twisting their etymology to fit some kind of racial bias is sort of weird.
And throwing aside 600 years of clarity for "basic manners" also seems rather weird. Sort of like banning the word "engender" because a small minority might find that to be offensive. It isn't clearer to use a different word than has been used for over half a millennium.
For a while, people were getting in trouble for using the word, "niggardly," even though it had nothing to do with the offensive term that it sounds like.
The difference being that the controversy around white/blacklist only appeared after someone said it was a controversy in 2018, which is extremely recent, and the wording doesn't contain any phonetic similarity to a term from slavery. Being able to be misheard is more of a problem when phonetics clash.
Should all terms for the colour-that-is-somewhat-the-absence-of-colour now be banned? Is Vanta Black now racist?
Manufactured controversy leads you down a path of absurdism. It isn't helpful to the people it purports to help, whilst granting the vocal group the ability to say they're being helpful whilst actively ignoring any actual problems.
Blacklist/whitelist are not used consistently, so the clarity is not there. You can't see whitelist and consistently know whether it's going to be an allow list or a deny list
I don't believe I have ever seen a single example of a whitelist not being a list of exemptions. Nor can I seem to find any.
Nor can I find any example where blacklist is not a list of denied subjects. A blacklisted person, website or process is immediately clear within their context.
Where the clarity is lacking is not clear to me. However the mismatch between "allow list" and "whitelist", is. The latter seems to have a different meaning altogether.
Sorry but I find this claim (which I've heard from others too) ridiculous. "Blacklist" is an actual common English word in the dictionary. "Denylist" is an incredibly awkward-sounding neologism without any context or history behind it. There is no way that "denylist" is the "objectively clearer" one here.
I suspect it is the perception that it's a bit pedantic to correct an otherwise correct answer. I agree with you, but also don't really think it needs to be corrected every single time someone posts whitelist/blacklist.
EDIT: apparently setting allowlist/denylist won't work so it's not just being pedantic, it's wrong.
You and everyone else who exhibit this are reading into things that don't exist. Language has context, words are part of language and so therefore words have context too.
Exactly. And using white/black as synonyms for good/bad may be creating context (connotations, really) that we don't want. It would be fine if we hadn't already overloaded those words to refer to people... but, here we are. In the context we've created. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The original poster used the terms used by the technology. The best choices for changing this terminology would be to write a treatise for HN consumption (to reach the community at large) or to contact the authors of the technology that use this terminology (to fix the origin in this case). Sniping a 'random internet poster' is just lazy trolling.
A black celebrity (forget who) said that he came to the realization growing up that the only positive connotation he could find for black was "in the black" with regards to finances.
The downside of that is being 'in the red', which is also potentially problematic.
To fix the problem, we either have to stop referring to any metaphor/symbol involving color with negative connotations; or we have to stop using color to identify and refer to people. I think the former is good for precision (allowlist/denylist are great identifiers in that regard), but won't really solve our other problems; while the latter is probably better for human dignity, mutual respect, and combating our propensity for tribalism/racism. (Or, why not, we could do both.)
