[kridsdale1]

At Meta, when this mass push for the rename happened across the industry, a few people spent nearly the full year just shepherding the renaming of master to main, and white box/black box to allowlist/blocklist.

This let them claim huge diff counts and major contributions to DEI and get promos.

[yokoprime]

This is why diffs / LoC is a terrible metric. It shows nothing other than a willingness to push large changesets upstream.

[jihadjihad]

Same at my org at the time, blacklist was nixed, no matter how many times the question, "What color is ink on a page?" was brought up.

[8organicbits]

Seems like a bad faith question, unfortunate that it was asked multiple times. Blacklist is derived from a definition where black means "evil, bad, or undesirable". When you say that ink is black, you're using a different definition, which relates to color. I don't know if I see the objection to blackbox, which uses a definition of "unknown". Personally, I think the harm is small but I look to people of color for guidance and prefer the more descriptive deny-list where I can. Cuts down on possible confusion for non-native English speakers too.

[1718627440]

Blacklist and Whitelist come from the behaviour of light on coloured surfaces. A black surface absorbs all light, a white reflects it. There is also Graylist.

I don't know of any connotation of black meaning "evil, bad, or undesirable". If anything black means "missing or vanished". Maybe that is different in your culture, but I never heard of it until now. Tons of things in everyday life are black including the most letters, signs and a lot of devices. The only thing that comes to my mind is tooth decay or pestilence, but that is hardly anything connotated with the colour per se.

[8organicbits]

A quick web search for "define black" and "etymology blacklist" readily finds "from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (a sense attested from 1590s, in black book)" and several similar results. But I didn't immediately see an etymology based on absorbing light.

I'd be curious to see a regional reference that shows an absorb/reflect etymology.

[reenorap]

The irony is that the term "Black" was precisely chosen by Black civil rights activists in the 1960s. This wasn't a term given by white people, it was specifically chosen by Blacks, because of its negative connotations. They wanted to embrace its negative connotations and turn it on its head, and that's where terms like "Black is beautiful" came from. They didn't want to be ashamed of it, that's why they embraced it. Black was not a term of shame, it was a term of power.

Now, the left wing activists have turned it on its head again, and now saying that the term "black" is shameful and racist. It's bizarre how ignorant people are who say the term "blacklist" is racist.

[ahhhhnoooo]

I think you've constructed a strawman. Can you point to evidence that people think the word black is shameful and racist?

Or maybe you are confusing the idea that 'using black to mean bad and white to mean good' is a problem?

Those are two different concepts.

[layer8]

> What color is ink on a page?

Middle gray, according to modern UX designers. ;)

[pmontra]

You are lucky. It's often light gray on thin fonts.

[pbhjpbhj]

The colour of the ink is not where "blacklist" comes from though? It's not from supposed skin colour either...

Blocklist makes more sense in most scenarios.

[tucnak]

They measure LoC contributions at FB?