“White Good, Black Bad” is a pretty easy case to win when it comes to the “should we consider changing how we speak to not look like an asshole” debate.
While the term blacklist does not originate from racist history, it has certainly been adopted by racists before computers, while terms like master and slave have clear links to slavery as a human history: in either case the terms along with others were found to be offensive to a large population and have since been changed to reflect human decency.
Various replacement terms for ‘master’ or ‘slave’ have been proposed and implemented. In 2020, GitHub replaced the default ‘master’ git branch with ‘main’.[18] Other replacement names include ‘default’, ‘primary’, ‘controller’, ‘root’, ‘initiator’, ‘leader’, ‘director’, ‘manager’; and for ‘slave’: ‘performer’, ‘worker’, ‘peripheral’, ‘responder’, ‘device’, ‘replica’, ‘satellite’, and ‘secondary’.[18][6][21][22][23] Python switched to ‘main’, ‘parent’, and ‘server’; and ‘worker’, ‘child’, and ‘helper’, depending on context.[7][24] The Linux kernel has adopted a similar policy to use more specific terms in new code or documentation.[22] Other projects and standards have used alternative terms since their inception.