If you're waiting for someone to find a case of someone joining the KKK because they once heard about a blacklist, of course that is never going to happen. This is about one facet of learning that happens over 20 years of someones childhood, and then trying to link it to statistical issues that emerge over large groups. If it were even possible to isolate all the different factors to just look at language, it would take generations to test.

This is where we're coming at it from different sides. I think changing language is a relatively cheap and easy thing to do, that might help fix an issue in some small way, and there's really not much reason not to. The cause and effect is plausible, if not provable on any reasonable timescale.

Metaphor, simile, pathetic fallacy are all powerful tools that really do change the way we interpret the substance of what we read. Colours too, it's not a coincidence the major tech brands have gone with various blues, those blues are deliberately designed to nudge people towards a particular emotional response that is completely unrelated to the brand itself. If word selection really did nothing to change the impression of what we read, then writers and poets would be out of a job.