Here's some more extensive reading from an earlier article when Maven did this: https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/no-more-inf...
The key bit:
> It reminded me of an iconic BBC interview with Muhammad Ali in 1971 where he recalled that all the positive things he grew up with were white, from White Cloud tissue paper to the White House, while all the negative things, from the bad luck of a black cat to the term blackmail, were black. Nearly 50 years later, that linguistic measuring stick is alive and well.
He's right. Lots of English therms equate black with bad and white with good. Blacklist and whitelist fit into that pattern, and changing it takes a small step in the other direction.
Blacklist's etymology isn't racist, but if black folks prefer that we use something else, and something as similar as blocklist is there and easy to use, it seems like an easy fix.