Change blacklist and whitelist terminology

Feature Requests Partially-implemented
50

Hi Villanoise,

I really appreciate your input on this. I tend to agree with you in every point you've raised. I realise this proposed change may be barely any direct help.

I look at it this way: Even from my own limited exposure to the wider topic of discrimination, I've seen numerous people argue about the use of seemingly innocuous language. I've always dismissed it as coming from those who live purely to argue and to signal their virtue as loudly as possible for their own agenda.

Also, and this is again anecdotal, my experience mirrors yours in respect of the general ethnicity of those often seen to be calling for this change.

Making this change would achieve a couple of things:-

  1. Giving a quick 'win' to those who campaign for it, whether it's meaningful in a wider sense or not.
  2. Removing this issue as something people like to make noise about, enabling therefore a higher chance of them moving on to something that more people actually care a lot about.

Not everyone can donate money. Not everyone can protest. Changing a few words in a piece of software may be insignificant by itself, but look where we are today... we're talking about this now as part of a wider issue at a time of heightened perception (and reception, hopefully!).

Maybe someone will read your words and act upon them in the way you wish. Maybe someone else will only support this change to Pi Hole. Either way, progress will be made in some small way.

52

Thanks DigitalStefan. I appreciate your post.

A win? For who exactly? Their ego?

I’m sorry, but this cannot keep happening. People are literally dying in the streets, and this is what you all come up with? A debate about the words “blacklist” and “whitelist”, are you kidding? Did anybody here even talked to a black person to know if this was an issue? Because it sure seems to me that nobody here did.

You think that once this distraction is over these people will begin paying attention to the real stuff? No. They will find another imaginary problem to fix, continue to pat themselves on the back, and still stay as far away from the real issues as possible.

There’s an interesting post above trying to justify all of this by sending the message: “We should do it because Google did it!” Sure, let’s follow the example of a company that has a track record of serious issues about diversity.

To address your other point, of course not everyone can donate money or go protest. But there are so many other things that can be done to help and positively affect lives. Just taking the time to talk and genuinely listen to a member of the affected communities would be a much better and meaningful action than what this thread is about (and also less insulting, honestly).

Stop doing inconsequential stuff to hide your inaction. This cannot keep happening.

The more I think about it, the more it infuriates me. And I’m not the only one, believe me. I’ll show myself out now. Good luck to you all.

6 Likes
53

I like the discussion going on here.
I am almost inclined to say burn down the house and kick black/white listing.
I'd rather make those few happy than being stubborn.
But there is also the practical use of colors for lists.
It allows simple classifications that are harder to describe by words.
Red list for warnings, green lists for trusted etc. as an example.
I believe this not to be a simple decision.
But will support whatever outcome!

2 Likes
54

The Android mobile operating system, the Go programming language, the PHPUnit library and the Curl file download utility have stated their intention to replace blacklist/whitelist with neutral alternatives.

Let's use more inclusive language because we can.

3 Likes
57

This is exactly the tl;dr (btw: one was really needed by now!) of this entire discussion.

Thank you sir/mam/person.

2 Likes
58

Just came here to weigh in - I just setup PiHole and it's awesome! I was, however, taken aback by the white/blacklist terminology. That's terminology that has to be part of our past! A big vote from me.

Also thanks Villanoise for weighing in, kudos.

2 Likes
61

Completely agree with clear terminology to define hardware and software features. Metaphors are not the way to go (regardless of how many years they've been in use). Time for change.

1 Like
63

This is a long discussion and we have seen many points for pro and con changing things. We have also heard people which you are patronizing for (yes, "black people" :scream:) and they said that it doesn't touch/hurt them at all to read "blacklist" anywhere. Just coming in here (probably as a "white man") and putting bold statements like

without contributing anything substantial is just useless.

2 Likes
64

I've lurked for a long time but registered to add my support for this topic. I'll vote when I unlock that capability.

I've worked in technology for my entire career and these terms are ubiquitous. That's part of the problem. Although we don't consciously associate the terms with racial meaning, using them is a constant reminder of how our society (speaking about the US) treats white as good and black as bad. To Villanoise's point, there are far more effective actions to take in promoting equity and tackling racism. That doesn't mean we can't, or shouldn't, take the easy ones (like this) too. Where this change does make a difference is by lessening the constant barrage of messages we all swim in everyday that communicates whiteness is better than blackness.

I don't personally believe that any meaning or utility is lost by switching to terms like "allow list" or "deny list." We lose nothing by changing terms, and we gain a better vernacular should the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis turn out to have some truth to it. It's really a very small ask.

As far as our ability to discuss topics like this, I think Jay Smooth said it well in this video: https://youtu.be/MbdxeFcQtaU?t=8. We have much bigger race issues to tackle and in order to do so, we need to be able to talk about it. This topic may be a really small one, but it's something. Don't let it be the only thing.

71

I think this request is rather contrary to the goal here. This request (IMO) is attempting to remove color connotation without regard to reason or justification beyond the attempt to end color connotation and "feel good" about doing something. If you really must remove color connotation through society you cannot stop at black and white. For an extremely simple and sarcastic example...

Red must be removed due to it's use in racism against Native Americans.
Yellow must be removed due to it's use in racism against Asians.
Green must be removed due to it's potential use in racism against aliens.

Obviously we are going to have to redesign all traffic safety signals/signage, alert prioritization/ranking visualizations, danger or criticality alarms, etc. We'll need to start by boycotting Star Trek. Has someone started a feature request to change the colors in the pi-hole query logs yet? I see that screen all the time and find it to be much more racially offensive than the whitelist/blacklist phrase I see less often.

I propose we redesign everything into shades of grey. Oh wait, how do I tell granny? :frowning:

Color connotation is not an inherently bad thing. Use and context are important. I have only done a brief search, but racism was not part of the etymology for the term "blacklist". I know it's wikipedia, but the references are pretty good.

Please, focus on effecting real change in the world, and let the dev team work on real features for pi-hole.

3 Likes
73

I find your response to be a mischaracterization of this issue. It's a straw man argument. No one is saying that we must remove colors from our technology or our world. I think it's safe to say that people don't see a red light and equate it to anything negative about Native Americans, or think a yellow sun painted on a wall is somehow offensive to Asians. This is a disingenuous argument.

Unfortunately, we see a lot of terms that reinforce black = bad and white = good throughout our society. Black sheep, white knight, black market, blackball, lily-white (innocent), black mark, blackmail. Blacklist and whitelist are just two prominent examples in technology. We also have master/slave and black hat/white hat. "Dark times" are bad followed by "brighter days" ahead. How would it feel if your name was John, and most of society seemed to use "John" as something negative? "Don't John out on me." "Did you check the John list?" What if these examples were gender based instead, and male-oriented terms were used to denote evil, incompetence or danger, while the female-oriented terms communicated the opposite? Would you call that situation sexist? It doesn't matter that we don't intend this meaning to exist; the fact is that these terms come with the baggage of history.

You quoted Wikipedia on this subject but neglected to mention the section on Computing, which points out how many technology companies are removing these terms from their code and documentation. Looking only slightly further into the etymology of blacklist would've made its racist connotation clear. Just one example: https://www.etymonline.com/word/blacklist

These terms have been in use for a long time but that doesn't make them inherently right or good. Language reflects our culture, and in the United States we've had a culture of racism, overt and covert white supremacy since before we declared our independence. That's the society that gave birth to the concepts and the terms we still use today! Moving away from terms that synonymize bad/lesser with race labels ought to be a good thing. Instead we have excuse after excuse about why this isn't appropriate, isn't "real" change, is well intentioned but misguided, etc. Sure, this is a very minor step but that doesn't mean it is without merit. How can we tackle the big stuff when we can't even change some words we use?

Ultimately, I'm not going to die on this hill. I just want you to ask yourselves why such a minor change is producing this much friction. Is your life going to be impacted by this change? Probably not. Even so, would you rather belong to a society pushing to be better with its language vs. one that would rather continue using the racist artifacts of the past? Which one is likely to be the morally correct one?

Nobody alive today created these terms. We learned about them without their racist connotations. We use them without racist intent. However, none of this absolves the society that created the terms or the terms themselves. We know better now and it's time to change.

3 Likes
78

So why does black then correlate to people with a darker skin color and white to people with a brighter skin color? Where does it stop, where does it start? You say this is a straw man argument. Yet, it is not.

Yes

No. I am a woman. I stumble upon a lot of things which are intended to be good for us. Like always using a female and a male phrase of a word all the time. This interrupts the flow of reading and just creates friction. I, as a woman, do not gain anything from this. It is not the same but still similar to some extend.

It is more than a simple change. It is on the order of being able to break virtually all external user scripts. I would not like to say that this is nothing. Yes, users can adapt their scripts. Yet it is a distraction and breaking something without any striving need to.

Seriously, this is the straw man argument. I am with you about "John". However, you are currently depriving black people of their names. I don't know where you live but over here we call black people by their names. They may be called Daniel or Susan. I would never call them "Mr. Black". So your argument is entirely void. Their name is not abused for anything.

This discussion has to come to an end. And this does not mean something needs to be changed. I know a lot of black people and I'm not 100% white myself. I discussed this issue with my friends and even partially (disconnected to Pi-hole) with family members and they feel no issues at all with blacklists and similar terms. However, they feel really bad with all the people coming out of the woodwork and patronizing for them. Telling that using the term "black" is not good. Some say because it is racist. Some say it is something from the past. Yet, nobody can understand our feelings. At least nobody involved in this discussion trying to patronize yet again with a wall-of-text of why they think the world can be made better in this and that direction.

And, please, this has nothing to do with the black-live-matters debate. The United States of Whitemerica have entirely different problems which are entirely unrelated here.

Seriously, it is just really annoying. Nobody seems to understand that it is the continuous discussion about what the white men can do for the black men that is the problem here. We could very well speak up for ourselves if we would have to.

2 Likes
85

Coro's reply is not a "solution", it's simply giving some xyz reason to ignore the problem. I believe the community is at fault, see more issues stated clearly and ignored nearly immediately and then the thread locked with the reason that there's an "existing issue" (circling back to Coro's "solution"!) https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/jypfkz/serious_pihole_and_its_community_stance_on/

86

Warning of all warnings.

If you try to bring reddit in to this I'll lock the whole thing. I don't want or need that taking over our support channels.

Edit: If you believe the community is at fault then please find another community.

87

I'm new here and not trying to pick a specific fight, but the reddit comments and my post brought this to my attention.

I simply don't understand why the "change blacklist/whitelist terms" thread here has gotten so friggin dismissive. Does the community intentionally ignore the MANY posts that ask for change? It's a BAD SIGN that the "solution" is GTFOut.

Create some proper defects in github(?) and the community would fix this shit for you.

88

We haven't made an official statement either way. We may change terms, we may not. Nothing has been dismissed.

There have been PRs opened to address it, but they don't fix anything and end up breaking the software. If someone wants to do the work, great. They can submit it to Github just like anyone else. We don't have hidden code, everyone sees everything we do.

On the whole, Pi-hole is "A blackhole for advertisements" using the theme of "blackholes" and vortexes. We have functions called "gravity" that produce lists of "matter and light", so blacklists and whitelists are pretty much in theme.

Reading over the reddit discussions it appears you are dismissing the opinions and wants of just about every person that has responded to you. I'm fairly confident you will dismiss my response as well. I've had some pretty horrible things said about me by people that don't know me, to the point that I had to delete my Twitter account.

So my official response as me, Dan Schaper, is "You'll see it when you see it." Browbeating me or my fellow developers and support people will not get you what you want. You've made your comments, they have been read and we'll act accordingly when it's time for us to act.

3 Likes
89

WOAH dude, I did not dismiss the replies that I received! One user reply was to the tone of

  • "Bribelist and shitlist does sound cooler!"
    and the other user
  • "This entire post is you dismissing valid feelings from the technical community. Perhaps you're the bigot. Open your mind."

Those folks clearly had no intention of being conversed with, but it's unfortunate that you'd use those comments as a way to dismiss my opinions. If those commenters are on your team, Dan, they should be reconsidered.

90

I didn't use those, I used the comments from the first thread you derailed. I know who's on my team, I trust them implicitly and don't question their actions. I'm not cancelling people for having beliefs that are contrary to mine. Note I'm not telling you what my personal beliefs are because they honestly don't affect my coding ability.

This is my second time saying that your comments have been heard, you don't need to post any more.

91

So I'm new here, there's no thread derailment by me other than this reddit post (and not-legit replies) which you weren't happy with https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/jypfkz/serious_pihole_and_its_community_stance_on/

I'm extremely unhappy with the (three) response in that thread, and that's why I'm here on pi-hole.net. This is Not an attack on you folks, I really don't like the previous replies and "solution" on this pi-hole.net thread.

I'm not familiar with the source trees, but I'd like to help in renaming the terminology

92

I'm referring to your derailing a discussion on lists with https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/jyck17/back_to_stock_blocklists_and_it_feels_so_good/gd4vsek/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm sorry you're unhappy with their responses, take that up with reddit. You're derailing this thread with complaints of responses by redditors.

Pi-hole · GitHub is where you can learn about the code.

I gave you two clear warnings, I don't give thirds. You can read the community for a bit, but your posting priv's are going to be suspended since you have nothing to add about the reasons for this feature request and instead are using your posts as a place to vent on a social platform not under our control.