
Chrome team to remove ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ to be more inclusive - woranl
https://9to5google.com/2020/06/07/google-chrome-blacklist-blocklist-more-inclusive/
======
LastOfTheFamous
All this speech-policing is only empowering the wrong kind of people.
Personally I never even made a connection to race when using words like
'blacklist'. Allowing activists to decide which words are improper or not-
inclusive makes communication like walking through a minefield. I live in
Germany, public communication in Academia has become unreadable at times with
application of 'inclusive' speech and 'proper' pronouns.

Remember this story?

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-
jokes...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-got-
two-people-fired-and-led-to-ddos-attacks/)

It won't stop with 'blacklist' or 'whitelist'. How many people stopped
contributing to open source projects because the "Code of Conduct"-politicos
(on a powertrip) started to politicize everything and harassing anyone that is
not 100% politically aligned until they left?

------
torstenvl
I have no inherent strong opinions on terminology, so I'll roll with it. But I
am concerned that this might be a symptom of a larger trend toward whimsically
inventive "solutions" that have ill defined or undefined MOEs.

What does this get us? Is there any evidence that these terms are harmful to
racial minorities? Do fMRIs or glucocorticoid sampling indicate that the use
of these terms causes a stress response? I'm skeptical, but I don't know.

By all means, we should question conventions that might be ill suited to an
enlightened society. However, every change costs political capital, and we
should be spending that political capital on _actual_ change rather than self-
congratulatory tinkering.

------
woranl
This kind of change does more harm than good to the society. It’s a
distraction to what really matters. Big corp just wants more brownie points.
It’s just gimmicks and it’s rather pointless.

~~~
jacoblambda
I think this is a good change for an entirely unrelated reason though.

Blacklist and Whitelist aren't intuitive terms. Blocklist and Allowlist make
way more sense from the user friendliness perspective, particularly so when it
comes to usability for non-native speakers.

I think generally this type of change makes sense so that meanings can easily
be determined from the terms' etymology.

------
RenRav
I thought blacklist was related to 'black out' meaning to censor something by
blacking it out. I don't know, it's a cool word, words with colors in the
names feel richer. Banlist/allowlist is simpler I guess, which is still nice.

