For better or worse, we are at an inflection point in society where society as a whole is deliberating the meaning and / or use of the terms "white" and "black".
I do strongly wonder whether this is "society" or only "people in the USA". It should be noted that historically bkacks were enslaved just as little or much as any other race in other countries, and I don't see those contries bending over to appease blacks because the Romans and Greeks would enslave them (as well as anyone else).
You note that "gay" has a different meaning today. As far as I know, the words "black" and "white" were not systematically used to refer to skin colors before about 1963, when a movement was set afoot in the USA to replace "negro" with "black" and "caucasian" with "white".
Yes, reference was made to skin colors before, and the English "negro" is obviously the same word as the Spanish "negro", but in that case, it is merely the name of a color. So the USA in the 1960s made the decision to take a word from a non-Latin root and apply that color as a substitute for a Latin word that denoted a race.
It therefore bothers me somewhat that we are now using this post-1963 renaming to condem terms like "blacklist" and "blackball" that have existed for over 2000 years, and "black sheep", which has doubtless existed in Egyptian for another 6000 years before that, as being racist and somehow denegrating African Americans specifically.
