HN Explorer

Is the word “Whitepaper” racially loaded?

1 points by pidgin123 ↗ HN
The term whitepaper originated with the British government and many point to the Churchill White Paper of 1922 as the earliest well-known example under this name.

Blacklist and whitelist are terms commonly used in computer science and cybersecurity to indicate something is allowed, or not allowed. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which defines the word as “a list of banned or excluded things of disreputable character,” its first known use dates back to 1624.

Racially loaded terms like Master-Slave, Whitelist-blacklist are now being replaced with primary-secondary, allowlist-denylist.

Is it time for the term Whitepaper to be replaced with something else? If so, what would you suggest?

10 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 42.8 ms ] thread
ZeroGravitas
I always like linking to this, as it shows how far we have (not) come:

A Person Paper on Purity in Language William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter)

From Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books, 1985.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...

The author has a post script at the bottom:

> Perhaps this piece shocks you. It is meant to. The entire point of it is to use something that we find shocking as leverage to illustrate the fact that something that we usually close our eyes to is also very shocking.

golem14
This did make my head spin. Thanks for the link!
golem14
What about white collar workers?
guywithahat
No, of course not. The real issue is the number of non academic staff in college campuses has been growing significantly faster than the number of professors, driving up costs and forcing them to come up with nonsensical projects to justify their costs. Famously in Stanford they have more staff than students, and this is one of those programs that do nothing but get in the way of actual progress.

https://higheredstrategy.com/one-last-thought-really-on-admi... https://archive.is/CYj7r

celticninja
No because there is no corresponding blackpaper and the etymology of the word has nothing to do with race.
dave4420
What is the etymology of “white paper”?

(Don’t mean to imply that you’re wrong, just curious.)

lax4ever
Even if there was a corresponding "black" addition that was meant to assignment the opposite meaning, that still would likely have nothing to do with race.
ClapperHeid
Oh god. Who let the SJ Warrior in?

White Papers [0] are the finalised policy documents published by UK government. They follow on from Green Papers [1], which are the preceding consultation documents.

For many years people have believed that these two terms innocently referred to the fact that the draft documents were printed on green paper [as a visible sign they were not finalised] and the final policy documents were printed on white paper as er... this is sort of the default colour of paper.

However, thanks to the crusading efforts of people like pidgin123, we now realise that green papers are species-ist against Martians and white papers are white supremacist. Therefore, from now on, all government papers will be printed in black ink on black paper and referred to as "Papers of Colo[u]r"

[0] https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/white-pa...

[1] https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/green-pa...

quantified
Master-slave is not racist, is it? Nasty social-economic relationship for sure. Do modern household slave holders, did Roman or Native American slave holders use race as the basis for slavery, or simply the fact of conquest or opportunity? Only some (very significant) slave systems used race, but it's functional distinction slavers chose other groups based on, not intrinsic. That's like saying a noose is inherently racist, many more white criminals were hung from them too over time.

Why don't left-handed people complain about being sinister? Don't they want their rights?