Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even though the etymologies of the words don't describe them as being based on race / racial judgments Then why should we change them? I know you said: > Setting aside the historical context, they also help reenforce the idea of "white is good, black is bad" But if we can't trust people to infer a word's meaning based on the context, we have a much bigger problem imo. Another example of this is the word gentleman.…
First, because there often isn't a context where the word has the correct meaning in the first place. If you have a list of disallowed curse word substrings and Dr. Theodore Fucknuckett gets upset at not being allowed to login, then adding "Fucknuckett" to something called a "whitelist" is using a somewhat tenuous connection to the meaning of whitelist. "Allowlist" is more direct. Also, I just made it up, and I gotta…
In this case, there's an unequivocally correct meaning to the term blacklist and whitelist that has nothing to do with race. Take the popular show The Blacklist[0], which goes so far as to title itself Blacklist, and I'm assuming it's because blacklist is such a well known term that immediately tells you what the show will be about.
> (I don't actually have a problem with "master copy".)
Isn't this exactly what a "master" branch is supposed to indicate? I was under the assumption that this is exactly why the name "master" branch was chosen. We don't have a master branch commanding slave branches how to code themselves. We have a master source of truth that all the sub branches derive from and eventually merge back into.
> A master/slave database setup gets its meaning from the master telling the slaves what to do
Fortunately I've never run into this naming schema for databases. Typically its a production, development, QA, etc for databases.
> Third, relying on the cultural meaning of colors is problematic for the very reasons you cite
Well this is the whole point of language. Of course I'm not going to understand the subtle cultural references in South Korean culture, because I'm not South Korean. Likewise I wouldn't expect people from different cultures to understand my cultural nuances. That's why good communicators tailor their speech to their audience.
This doesn't mean you can't use cultural references though. And it certainly doesn't mean that one culture can impose arbitrary language constructions on another culture because their offended by the meaning. Mature people will usually tell the offender that they've been offended. Then the offender should be able to explain they meant no offense, in my culture this term means this. And if the offended person understands different cultures have different contexts, then they can happily move on with their life and understand that specific subtlety.
My biggest complaint is nobody is asking to change these terms because they've suddenly been deemed inadequate at explaining the concept. People are trying to change these terms in the name of "social justice". If people can't understand that language evolves over time, and they can't separate their emotions from simply understanding the context of the situation, then we have much bigger problems.
How are we supposed to study earlier works of literature that have ugly things in it? As we've seen with To Kill a Mockingbird, people are trying to tear everything down, even though the book is about the evil of racism! [1]
This author writes a more nuanced article on why changing language for social justice is a bad idea [2]. All in all, we need to stop injecting racism into everything. It's getting to the point where we can't say black because that my offend somebody, and that my friend, is insane lol.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blacklist
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-are-we-still-teach...
[2]: https://seattlecollegian.com/op-ed-blacklist-and-whitelist-a...