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.
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.
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.