[epgui]

> Some radical people have suddenly started to think blacklist and whitelist are racially insensitive. Are they really racist words? The answer is a no.

In my books, these people aren't "radical", they're simply "wrong".

Calling them "radical" gives the impression that being mindful about the language we choose to accept socially is in general radical. Of course it isn't.

[polotics]

Talking about words and their meaning, "radical" comes from the latin for root, so a true radical should get to the bottom of things, work from first principles...

Let's have a go!

It is dark at night, and black is dark. The one thing that's clear is "white" human skin ain't white, and "black" ain't black either. So... saying black or white to categorize any member of the human race is incorrect, using "blacklist" for something that can't see the light is kinda correct.

[kjeetgill]

I'm actually incredibly fascinated by this tortured comment.

In a comment advocating for getting to the bottom of things and first principles of "words and their meanings" of all things (whatever that means here, I don't know), you:

a) misinterpret what any current usage of radical would mean b) proceed to, from what I presume your idea of presume principles is, chain together a half hearted series of arbitrary connections c) continue to skip over any well understood meaning of whiee and black in the context of race for not being literal enough? d) but conclude that a very unusual, uncommon, tenuous metaphors about blacklists being for blocking light being more correct somehow?

There's just so much going on in such a short comment. I really hope it was on purpose, it's Terry Pratchett-esq.

Like isn't black a literal color first and foremost before being an allusion to darkness and light? Even if it's not the precise color, isn't that ... closer via whatever your first principles are here?

[epgui]

(The comment you're replying to didn't make sense to me either, but it is true that in the literal, pedantic world, black isn't really a colour. It's true that "black" is just a word we use to describe how our brains interpret the near-absence of light in a patch of our field of vision. In other words, black is the absence of colour/light.)

[TeeMassive]

From my own experience, the people declaring usual words and expressions racist tend to pride themselves as being "radical".