“Whitelist” and “Blacklist” are the newest terms the social justice crowd has deemed necessary to toss out like your grandma’s holiday fruitcake—for their obvious racial bias. Whitelist is defined as a list of explicitly approved or included entities. A blacklist is the opposite, a list of explicitly banned or excluded entities. I would provide the Merriam-Webster definition for blacklist, but it appears it's already changed it a la Webster's crusade on “racism”. Either way, both terms are industry staples in the information security field that allow security practitioners to explicitly control entities with which a computer interacts. For example, a network administrator may blacklist a website to prevent employees from accessing it (YouTube) or may whitelist specific users to access a private database.
These terms are so clearly indicative of systematic racism that everyone told about them must, well… be told about it! If you haven’t figured out why these terms are racist, it could be that you are part of the problem, or you may just have better things to do than find offense around every corner like a racial "Where’s Waldo"? As CNN explains it, the terms “reinforce notions that black=bad and white=good”; instead they offer the alternatives “deny list” and “allow list”, respectively. Common sense might suggest that if you conflate black=bad and white=good with race, that you might be the racist.
So isn't it ironic that CNN, the bastion of social justice battalions, would love to blacklist anything they view as pro-white and whitelist anything they view as pro-black? Rather, a non-racial explanation of the terms’ references to color is simple if you understand their meaning. White and black apply to the concepts of light and dark, seen and unseen, respectively. A whitelist contains entities you’d be able to see (visible in the light) while a blacklist contains entities that you are not supposed to or able to see (not visible in dark) .
One might argue that the social justice movement's semantic games are just "pandering to those who have no stomach for straight language, insisting instead upon bland, non-controversial sauces—which is just a waste of time". Oh wait, Saul Alinsky said that! I wonder if he also thinks that using substitutes for words is an attempt “to detour around reality” and, if continued, that “we [would] soon become averse to thinking in vigorous, simple, honest terms”. *Hint: he does.
Pointing this out will be criticized as insensitive to the marginally offended or as being tone deaf. But is it more tone deaf than CNN crying out over “mean” words in the midst of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, the corresponding murder of dozens of Americans in city streets, and the setting of America’s cities on fire? That’s almost like crying over "mean" words while dozens of Americans are murdered in the street and America’s cities are being set on fire!
Instead, what if we were to stop and get our priorities straight? Maybe a better time to focus our attention on "bad words", if at all, is once slavery no longer exists around the world—not when the biggest racial movement since the Civil Rights era is happening. Please don’t think the irony is lost on me that I have to waste digital ink on this war over words while it could be spent on the millions still suffering under slavery and other civil rights abominations. Some people need to check their privilege.
Call it a blacklist, whitelist, deny list, allow list. Ok, so it doesn't have quite the same ring as a Dr. Seuss rhyme, but with CNN’s backing of the Culture War’s constant assault on the use of everyday words, the United States will soon sound more like There’s a Wocket in my Pocket than the days of Davy Crockett.