this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Yes. In the same way that "Master" and "Slave" have been replaced for racist engineering terminology, "Whitelist" and "Blacklist" are replaced with "Allowlist" and "Blocklist".
Do these terms actually come from racist backgrounds, or did they come up as a coincidence?
It just feels weird someone would think of a way to degrade black people then decide to use blacklist for things they don't want, then engineers decide to use master and slave to piss off black people whatever. Is that literally the history behind it?
Blacklist was specifically used to refer to the refusal of entry as if they were a black person, so yes there is a racist history. Master and Slave is pretty obvious why especially considering everyone uses Parent/Child and Primary/Secondary these days anyway. Like maybe 10% of the change was because of "je-I-mean-sjws being offended" and like 90% just practicality because they're outdated terms that aren't really used.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting
still not the best term