I'm not sure if it's about making them taboo. We're not "banning" the words white and black. We're not saying you can't use those words to describe color for instance (e.g. "the wall is white", "this car is black"). The way I tend to see it is that we reached a level of sensitivity that leads us to be more explicit about our choice of words. I would call myself somewhat socially progressive but now I have to admin that I've never questioned the terms whitelist and blacklist. Now that I do, it seems obvious to me that "black" and "white" prefixes aren't good terms to use in the first place. How is someone even supposed to know which one is "allow" and which one is "deny". "Allowlist" and "Denylist" or something like that would be way more descriptive AND would simply be more sensitive to what's going on in the world. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum, we can't ignore social issues.
Making certain uses of some words a taboo is exactly what's happening. Which, in some cases, just seems arbitrary and not related to a societal problem, let alone its solution. It's a good thing we are becoming more sensitive to these topics, and that they are beginning to get the attention to hopefully bring meaningful change. However, as is the case with any sufficiently big movement, subgroups will form that have their own interpretation of the goal, and some of those will end up being detrimental to the overall cause. For example, the few individuals rioting during the recent protests hurt the entire movement one way or another. This comparison is to be taken with a grain of salt, but my impression has been that the whole debate on certain words is somewhat similar to that, in much lesser form of course. There is language that needs changing. There is also language that I would argue doesn't, and arbitrarily creating artificial sensitivity just dilutes the original, important message.
When I hear the word camp, I don't immediately think of labour camps, the same way I don't think of race when I hear the word blacklist. That's not the case for everyone, so it does need addressing. What it boils down to is the question when and why it was concluded that deprecating those neutral uses was the better solution over deprecating their negative connotations. It mostly just seems counter-intuitive to me for the reason stated in my previous comment.
Except how is a blacklist "bad" and a whitelist "good" ? I've never thought of it this way; I dont think many people have but I could he wrong.
If there was some race related history to the words I could understand, but I thought they were called this way purely because the colours black and white are opposites, like how a blacklist is the opposite to a whitelist and vice versa.
I have always thought the analogizing of white to “good” and black to “bad” comes directly from absence of light (dark; black) or the presence of light (bright; white).
Because we are not nocturnal creatures, darkness == scary and daytime == security so therefore black == bad and white == good.
I can see how one who is hyper-focused on race might see that as problematic, but to me, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
It's a thing because there's a pandemic and another Black guy was murdered by police -- George Floyd. Because of the pandemic, people reacted uncharacteristically and raised hell instead of our usual reaction of sort of shrugging and making excuses.
So a lot of different things are being impacted by our uncharacteristic willingness to take action about systemic racism, including use of language.
Are people implicating it has something to do with race? Because it don't see the connection.