7 ms·

Since when is black and white primarily a racial thing anyways? It seems a little inverted, like a black flag or a black mark on an account, it’s not like it’s

Since when is black and white primarily a racial thing anyways? It seems a little inverted, like a black flag or a black mark on an account, it’s not like it’s called “negrolist”, black and white are colors before they are slang for race/culture. Maybe instead of neutering the dictionary we could try a different angle and quit lumping people into “white” or “black”? Some people are Kenyan, Irish, Nigerian, German, nobody is actually white or black.

silicon2401 5y ago
This is the hypocrisy of radical leftists in a nutshell. They claim to fight racial thinking while in fact just making it more prominent than it's been in decades.
- madamelic 5y ago
  It's also what will cause the far right to succeed. The left eats its own rather than being patient or tolerant ("I shouldn't have to teach you!") to people who mean well, while the right allows people to fly way off the handle and still be within their tent because their tent expands to include increasingly extreme ideas.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    Are you inferring/suggesting that the "right" avoids eating its own?
    - lxgr 5y ago
      Exactly – if anything, research suggests that there might be some underlying mechanism affecting both ends of the political spectrum. I found this to be a very interesting read on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...
      - travisgriggs 5y ago
        Yep. Read and appreciated that article. And I will say what I have been repeating in these forums for a couple of months now again. It's ironic in this case, because today's hot topic is "the meaning of words". We keep talking about social media and its problematic effects. Like we don't know how to be social or something anymore. It's not social media. It's profit/engagement media. The social component is just the hook. The point of it all is basic profit feedback loops (which are far less greedy and evil than we make these utilities out to be--they're just doing what they were instituted to do). My current brainstorm/crazy idea is that something like "non profit" regulations might be how we coral this nuttiness. It's been semi/mostly effective at corralling religion in America for many years. I'm not sure why we wouldn't benefit from moving the Twitter Day Saints and Instagramists and Tik-Tok-ies and SnapChat Witnesses and Roamin Pathic Twitch into the same "you have your place, you can take care of your own and collect enough funds to operate and some, but if you start looking too much like a business and/or play in politics too much, it's going to get really uncomfortable for you."
  - sjtindell 5y ago
    Both sides eat their own. It’s a result of social media cancel culture, which both sides engage in. No moderate opinions allowed anywhere. The right constantly rejects people who aren’t extreme enough. “Rino” is a huge term now.
  - nullc 5y ago
    Google is teaching people about wrongspeak with this new feature! it's on you if you don't want to obey!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
knorker 5y ago
I think they're trying to change language to disassociate "black" with negative meaning. Which is going to be very hard, because the reason for the association is from black being the unknown. It's the night that hides the predators. It's the shadow where the enemy hides. It's where you don't want to put your foot in case there are spiders or a sharp rock. Humans are afraid of the dark. I've not even heard of being afraid of the light. Death and darkness. I'd like a historian to confirm, but I'd be very surprised if this type of language didn't exist in most places, including before ever seeing a darker skinned person. But this effort is doomed to fail. You can be afraid of the dark at night and that is not a predictor at all of racism. Indeed, do people with darker skin not get afraid of the dark?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- quenix 5y ago
  This makes sense to me. Why is it downvoted?
  - lxgr 5y ago
    Probably because that's not the only possible interpretation of the issue. I agree that in some instances, white seems to be primarily used as a synonym for bright/light, and black as one for darkness, shadow etc., such as in the case of white and black box testing. However, other cases, such as "whitelist" and "blacklist", seem more nefarious at least in some cultures: A list of names, one of people to grant access to some service or facility, the other to be denied... And as somebody else has already noted, for somebody without that cultural background, it might not even make any sense, unlike the much more self-describing alternatives "allowlist" and "denylist". If there is an alternative available that is both more straightforward and that has less negative connotations – why not advocate for its use, and assume that those that do so do it out of good intentions (while at the same time not assuming that people using the other terms do so out of a desire to cause harm)? The main problem seems to be that, as in many such cases, a nuanced discussion of the topic does not fit into a tweet or news headline, nor a Slackbot autoresponse, and least of all into a grammar checker.
astura 5y ago
"Blacklist" and "whitelist" suck anyway because they require the cultural knowledge that "black is bad and white is good" to understand their meaning. "Allowlist" and "denylist" don't require any cultural background to understand - their names are purely descriptive. They are just better terms.
- bloak 5y ago
  What about "redlist" and "greenlist"? The association between "red" and "stop", and between "green" and "go", seem more arbitrary than the associations with "black" and "white" but almost everyone in the world is familiar with traffic lights. (And the inhabitants of the North Sentinel Island probably don't need to configure mail servers or whatever.)
  - svachalek 5y ago
    Red and green mean stop/go but only in a narrow context. I would have no idea what redlist and greenlist means. Red and green also bring to mind Christmas and Martians. Red means communism, green means environmentalism. Green means money, red means a negative entry in your account. There's a lot of culture-specific meanings too. Red in China is associated with good fortune and happiness.
  - lxgr 5y ago
    Red and green traffic lights (and indeed even the distinction between green and blue) are not universally understood either: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-japanese-traffic-light-blues-stop-on-red-go-on-what/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-ja... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... What's your objection to "allowlist" (or "golist") and "denylist"/"blocklist"/"stoplist"? It's not often that we have an almost universally better alternative, but at least to me it seems like this is the case here. (Yes, allow/deny have one syllable more each, but I think we'll live.)
    - bloak 5y ago
mortenjorck 5y ago
This is indeed the root of my problem with the attempt to cast "blacklist" and "whitelist" as problematic. It confuses cause and effect. If we're going to try to re-engineer spoken English, I'd much rather address the root causes, which were the adoption of such literally black-and-white terms as racial identifiers in the first place. Calling light-skinned European-descended people "white" and dark-skinned members of the African diaspora "black" was always a divisive oversimplification of a nuanced web of ethnic heritages. This doesn't fit neatly into a woke/anti-woke framework, but I try to avoid using "black" and "white" to describe people whenever I can, preferring something either more descriptive or contextual.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  I think the debate over whitelist/blacklist is often pointless. Yes there is not cause/effect link, but it honestly doesn't really matter. Allowlist and blocklist are much better words imo because they are self-descriptive, whereas whitelist/blacklist requires context and pre-existing knowledge to understand. And to you it may be obvious, but not everyone is from the same culture and has English as a first language. Why not just use the better terminology? I am not advocating for banning the terms above, just to make an attempt going forward to slowly migrate to the other ones when possible.
dang 5y ago
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123767.)
lokar 5y ago
If you view these things from a POV of empathy for others and how to minimize their stress and sense of being disfavored vs trying to win some technical argument it will make more sense. Focus on how real actions impact the people around you.

silicon2401 5y ago

This is the hypocrisy of radical leftists in a nutshell. They claim to fight racial thinking while in fact just making it more prominent than it's been in decades.

madamelic 5y ago
It's also what will cause the far right to succeed. The left eats its own rather than being patient or tolerant ("I shouldn't have to teach you!") to people who mean well, while the right allows people to fly way off the handle and still be within their tent because their tent expands to include increasingly extreme ideas.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  Are you inferring/suggesting that the "right" avoids eating its own?
  - lxgr 5y ago
    Exactly – if anything, research suggests that there might be some underlying mechanism affecting both ends of the political spectrum. I found this to be a very interesting read on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...
    - travisgriggs 5y ago
      Yep. Read and appreciated that article. And I will say what I have been repeating in these forums for a couple of months now again. It's ironic in this case, because today's hot topic is "the meaning of words". We keep talking about social media and its problematic effects. Like we don't know how to be social or something anymore. It's not social media. It's profit/engagement media. The social component is just the hook. The point of it all is basic profit feedback loops (which are far less greedy and evil than we make these utilities out to be--they're just doing what they were instituted to do). My current brainstorm/crazy idea is that something like "non profit" regulations might be how we coral this nuttiness. It's been semi/mostly effective at corralling religion in America for many years. I'm not sure why we wouldn't benefit from moving the Twitter Day Saints and Instagramists and Tik-Tok-ies and SnapChat Witnesses and Roamin Pathic Twitch into the same "you have your place, you can take care of your own and collect enough funds to operate and some, but if you start looking too much like a business and/or play in politics too much, it's going to get really uncomfortable for you."
- sjtindell 5y ago
  Both sides eat their own. It’s a result of social media cancel culture, which both sides engage in. No moderate opinions allowed anywhere. The right constantly rejects people who aren’t extreme enough. “Rino” is a huge term now.
- nullc 5y ago
  Google is teaching people about wrongspeak with this new feature! it's on you if you don't want to obey!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

knorker 5y ago

I think they're trying to change language to disassociate "black" with negative meaning. Which is going to be very hard, because the reason for the association is from black being the unknown. It's the night that hides the predators. It's the shadow where the enemy hides. It's where you don't want to put your foot in case there are spiders or a sharp rock. Humans are afraid of the dark. I've not even heard of being afraid of the light. Death and darkness. I'd like a historian to confirm, but I'd be very surprised if this type of language didn't exist in most places, including before ever seeing a darker skinned person. But this effort is doomed to fail. You can be afraid of the dark at night and that is not a predictor at all of racism. Indeed, do people with darker skin not get afraid of the dark?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
quenix 5y ago
This makes sense to me. Why is it downvoted?
- lxgr 5y ago
  Probably because that's not the only possible interpretation of the issue. I agree that in some instances, white seems to be primarily used as a synonym for bright/light, and black as one for darkness, shadow etc., such as in the case of white and black box testing. However, other cases, such as "whitelist" and "blacklist", seem more nefarious at least in some cultures: A list of names, one of people to grant access to some service or facility, the other to be denied... And as somebody else has already noted, for somebody without that cultural background, it might not even make any sense, unlike the much more self-describing alternatives "allowlist" and "denylist". If there is an alternative available that is both more straightforward and that has less negative connotations – why not advocate for its use, and assume that those that do so do it out of good intentions (while at the same time not assuming that people using the other terms do so out of a desire to cause harm)? The main problem seems to be that, as in many such cases, a nuanced discussion of the topic does not fit into a tweet or news headline, nor a Slackbot autoresponse, and least of all into a grammar checker.

astura 5y ago

"Blacklist" and "whitelist" suck anyway because they require the cultural knowledge that "black is bad and white is good" to understand their meaning. "Allowlist" and "denylist" don't require any cultural background to understand - their names are purely descriptive. They are just better terms.

bloak 5y ago
What about "redlist" and "greenlist"? The association between "red" and "stop", and between "green" and "go", seem more arbitrary than the associations with "black" and "white" but almost everyone in the world is familiar with traffic lights. (And the inhabitants of the North Sentinel Island probably don't need to configure mail servers or whatever.)
- svachalek 5y ago
  Red and green mean stop/go but only in a narrow context. I would have no idea what redlist and greenlist means. Red and green also bring to mind Christmas and Martians. Red means communism, green means environmentalism. Green means money, red means a negative entry in your account. There's a lot of culture-specific meanings too. Red in China is associated with good fortune and happiness.
- lxgr 5y ago
  Red and green traffic lights (and indeed even the distinction between green and blue) are not universally understood either: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-japanese-traffic-light-blues-stop-on-red-go-on-what/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-ja... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... What's your objection to "allowlist" (or "golist") and "denylist"/"blocklist"/"stoplist"? It's not often that we have an almost universally better alternative, but at least to me it seems like this is the case here. (Yes, allow/deny have one syllable more each, but I think we'll live.)
  - bloak 5y ago

mortenjorck 5y ago

This is indeed the root of my problem with the attempt to cast "blacklist" and "whitelist" as problematic. It confuses cause and effect. If we're going to try to re-engineer spoken English, I'd much rather address the root causes, which were the adoption of such literally black-and-white terms as racial identifiers in the first place. Calling light-skinned European-descended people "white" and dark-skinned members of the African diaspora "black" was always a divisive oversimplification of a nuanced web of ethnic heritages. This doesn't fit neatly into a woke/anti-woke framework, but I try to avoid using "black" and "white" to describe people whenever I can, preferring something either more descriptive or contextual.

ehsankia 5y ago
I think the debate over whitelist/blacklist is often pointless. Yes there is not cause/effect link, but it honestly doesn't really matter. Allowlist and blocklist are much better words imo because they are self-descriptive, whereas whitelist/blacklist requires context and pre-existing knowledge to understand. And to you it may be obvious, but not everyone is from the same culture and has English as a first language. Why not just use the better terminology? I am not advocating for banning the terms above, just to make an attempt going forward to slowly migrate to the other ones when possible.

dang 5y ago

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123767.)

lokar 5y ago

If you view these things from a POV of empathy for others and how to minimize their stress and sense of being disfavored vs trying to win some technical argument it will make more sense. Focus on how real actions impact the people around you.