Comment on An update to how many boring, repetitive communities I need to block to make Lemmy enjoyable
shiftymccool@programming.dev 2 months agoThe aren’t even racial terms, they were used for unionized vs. ununionized workers. Maybe we should be working on not calling people by color names. Not being able to use colors to describe things in the world because it is racially-adjacent is getting a bit difficult
cooopsspace@infosec.pub 2 months ago
That’s actually not true at all.
The word relates to “Labor relations” by which it means the 17th century where there was widespread slavery of overwhelmingly black people.
Blacklist referred to people who are untrustworthy, suspicious, to be excluded or avoided.
And white being good and trustworthy.
The term “blacklist” contains the word “black”, which can unintentionally reinforce negative racial stereotypes. Associating “black” with something undesirable or harmful can inadvertently perpetuate harmful biases and contribute to systematic racism.
While the term “whitelist” may not appear as directly problematic, it reinforces a hierarchy with “white” as the preferred or privileged category. Such implications can subtly influence our thinking and conserve racial biases.
shiftymccool@programming.dev 2 months ago
So, we’re destined to make new words for colors because all the color words we have now are taboo?
Blackmail was used in England and Scotland to describe money paid by tenant farmers to a chieftan: history.com/…/where-did-the-word-blackmail-come-f…
Black sheep literally comes from black sheep. That one is really obvious… www.etymonline.com/word/black sheep
Black market was more associated with anarchists that used black as their color than actual black people. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market
The goal here shouldn’t be changing peoples’ view on the concepts of white/black. We need to stop people from using those words to describe people. People (outside rare cases) are not BLACK or WHITE or YELLOW or RED, or… how about we use actual people names for people?
White and black as colors and concepts are too important to have to tippy-toe around. If something is black, I should be able to say so without getting internet-spanked. Etymology means something regardless of what anybody thinks. You can’t just make something racist because it has a color word in it.
Can everybody just stop looking for things to be mad about for a hot minute?
cooopsspace@infosec.pub 2 months ago
All your references confirm what I’m saying.
Blackmail literally speaks to what I’m saying, ie. Black Market ie. Slavery. Dirty. Lesser. Unusable. Prostitution. People trafficking.