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by padjo 995 days ago
I don’t think the idea is to convert neo-nazis. People feel pretty powerless to help fight racism and doing small things like this help them feel a bit better.

Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.

2 comments

> Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.

That isn't what they say at all. The only way that argument holds any water is with profound ignorance.

It's the same line of thinking as saying that "red team" is offensive because "red" used to be a derogatory term for native Americans. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816

So why do we exclusively use blacklist to refer to bad things we want to exclude?
For the same reason black card is considered exclusive and prestigious. Maybe you are the problem, associating everything with race and in if in your mind black is inferior, then everything using black as an adjective would be negative for you.
This is the point you can never get through to them.

The word itself isn't negative. It's usage _may_ be negative, but if you think the word itself is negative then you're the racist one.

It's originally from England, hundreds of years ago, not US history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting

But it does hurt since it equates anti-racism with meaningless nonsense therefore directly undermining the purported cause.

Unless of course the real motivation isn't to help but instead to demonstrate power and status...