What? Did I miss a memo or something? I would have hoped to get an actual answer to my question instead of rhetorical sighs (and downvotes). Note: I am not a native English speaker.
Yes, but why? How? I'm a non-native-speaker as well, and these things might be obvious to you, but they aren't to me. Is it a "should not use it", "must not use it", "maybe" or "it's fashionable"? How bad would it be if I accidentially use it, more like a four-letter-word or more like "well, he's a foreigner, he doesn't know"?
I'm the opposite of the other person: Use the known terms until someone complains. Very few people have a problem with `blacklist` just like very few people had a problem with `master` branch.
That's the problem with flamewars. You can't really recommend in any direction without baiting the flames. You'll just have to look for previous discussions and decide for yourself.
Yes, there was never some contract that we all signed or some thing some majority of us formally voted that says "we're not supposed to call it a blacklist/whitelist anymore.
Just what some random groups decided and enforced at their own domains (companies, orgs, etc.).
It's also based on an American preoccupation with race issues, seeing everything through it's own guilt-ridden history, concerns not relevant to other parts of the world (where code is written and English is also spoken, as first or second language for IT).
The connotations of black/white s terms have nothing to do with slavery or blacks, the term blacklist was first used (recorded) in an English theater play, as the list of the enemies of the kind (black alluding to shady, dark motives, etc, not to skin color), and its common colloquial use in the 20th century was also not about blacks or had anything to do with slavery: it was the list where employees put union members, strikers, etc not to hire.
It's better for people in the US to concentrate on fixing actual racial issues (from incarceration rates and cop shootings, to school funding, redlining and loan access) than to play with words to pat itself in the back.
People all over the world have used black/white to certain things (sometimes the inverse too, e.g. in some asian cultures white is associated with death), and it has nothing to do with the US practicing slavery, seggregation, and racism to blacks.
We use those terms with some connotations for centuries before blacks were sold as slaves to pick your cotton, even at times when slaves where whites working for other whites (as in Ancient Persia, Greece, the Roman Empire, feudal times, and so on).
