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Thx for link. Everytime i read the word ‘whitelist’, i think, havn’t they caught up with the times, thats racist, whitelist. Why does white suggest good?
by sbhn 8y ago
Thx for link. Everytime i read the word ‘whitelist’, i think, havn’t they caught up with the times, thats racist, whitelist. Why does white suggest good?
- breischl 8y agoI've wondered that too. My inexpert, unresearched guess is that people are scared of darkness, because we don't see too well. Hence black is a scary/bad color, and blacklists are the things to avoid. Brightness is good - you can see, it's usually warm, etc. Hence whitelist. But like I said, total off-the-cuff guess, take it for what it's worth.
- sbhn 8y agoGood response, i thought it was left over terminology from segregation times. You may be right
- umeshunni 8y agoThere was English before America, FYI
- jannes 8y agoI am pretty sure the continent existed before English.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y agoI want this to be satire
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago>Thx for link. Everytime i read the word ‘whitelist’, i think, havn’t they caught up with the times, thats racist, whitelist. Why does white suggest good? I can’t tell if this is satire. Which means it’s either really good, or sad times we’re living in.
- justtopost 8y agoI could not agree more. Its scary this stuff is so common recently, much less here.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoI remember people making this joke decades ago. It would easily fit in with complaints about the 90's being too PC.
- mikejb 8y agoThere's plenty of similar cases in IT. Some people find Master/Slave offensive - though I personally believe this is a 'looking for problems'-kind of thing.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoYeah, we'd have to go through all sorts of books and documents on mechanics and electronics to whiteout (Doh! doing it again!!!) reference to those terms.
- thecatspaw 8y agowhiteout is an interesting one though, I personally would have written blackout
- dkersten 8y agoIt’s whiteout because of tipp-ex/white-out/liquid paper style products.
- Jach 8y agoI like rub out (from the space cadet keyboard's backspace equivalent).
- greenyoda 8y agoActually, "rub out" goes all the way back to Teletype keyboards: > "This code was originally used to mark deleted characters on punched tape, since any character could be changed to all ones by punching holes everywhere. If a character was punched erroneously, punching out all seven bits caused this position to be ignored or deleted, a computer version of correction fluid." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delete_character#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delete_character#History
- guitarbill 8y agomaybe we should change brownout, Brown noise, and Brownian motion while we're there /s
- jerf 8y ago"White" as symbolizing purity or goodness and "black" for contamination or evil is used by a wide variety of cultures around the world, only a minority of which happens to consist primarily of people with un-melanined skin. If you think "whitelist" and "blacklist" is racist, just wait until you find out about Yin and Yang.
- CPLX 8y agoIndeed. Perhaps also worth noting is that in actuality humans are pretty much all varying shades of brown.
- echelon 8y agoWe're changing instances of whitelist and blacklist to "allowlist" and "blocklist" similar to the conversion of master and slave to "primary" and "replica". Edit: it's interesting that I'm being downvoted. What a weird world this is.
- interesthrow2 8y ago> We're changing instances of whitelist and blacklist to "allowlist" and "blocklist" similar to the conversion of master and slave to "primary" and "replica". Are you going to change the whole dictionary as well? blackout? blackhole? dark energy? dark matter? dark side of the moon? and what not? Might as well deem the whole english language offensive since its the language of slavers? Maybe you should focus on real problem instead of slacktivism Silicon Valley style? And I say that as an African descent: The great majority of us don't care about master/slave dichotomy in a source code. Stop being offended on our behalf, there are real problems in the real world that needs fixing and this is not one of them.
- echelon 8y agoChanging these takes next to zero effort. "Blacklist" and "whitelist" are more confusing to new engineers than "allowlist" and "blocklist", since the latter terms speak for themselves. Language changes over time. These are just words. I don't understand why we have to hold onto them like they're our precious children. If we can be more inclusive with the labels we choose, that's a good thing.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoI would suggest you do some research on the etymology of the terms.
- dkersten 8y agoHistorically (eg in different religions and such), light was associated with good and dark with bad/evil. You have yin and yang, light and dark, day and night, positive and negatice. It has no racial connotations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism
- rabidrat 8y ago"white" people aren't actually white-colored, and "black" people aren't actually black-colored. The real problem is that we don't say "fair" and "dark" skinned.