The term whitepaper originated with the British government and many point to the Churchill White Paper of 1922 as the earliest well-known example under this name.
Blacklist and whitelist are terms commonly used in computer science and cybersecurity to indicate something is allowed, or not allowed. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which defines the word as “a list of banned or excluded things of disreputable character,” its first known use dates back to 1624.
Racially loaded terms like Master-Slave, Whitelist-blacklist are now being replaced with primary-secondary, allowlist-denylist.
Is it time for the term Whitepaper to be replaced with something else? If so, what would you suggest?
White Papers [0] are the finalised policy documents published by UK government. They follow on from Green Papers [1], which are the preceding consultation documents.
For many years people have believed that these two terms innocently referred to the fact that the draft documents were printed on green paper [as a visible sign they were not finalised] and the final policy documents were printed on white paper as er... this is sort of the default colour of paper.
However, thanks to the crusading efforts of people like pidgin123, we now realise that green papers are species-ist against Martians and white papers are white supremacist. Therefore, from now on, all government papers will be printed in black ink on black paper and referred to as "Papers of Colo[u]r"
[0] https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/white-pa...
[1] https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/green-pa...