I think you're very, very much on target here, especially with the human psychology of changing views.

The one caveat I'd add is that I don't think in the case of DiAngelo and people like that that the character of the efforts were entirely accidental--they might misjudge how what they're doing will shape society, but if they are misjudging how certain phrases will be taken they are preposterously bad at their jobs.

DiAngelo's expertise, aside from racism, is in critical discourse analysis, which is precisely designed to understand how terms make people feel and what hidden messages there are behind terms.

So if you have the presence of mind to point out that maybe blacklist has connotations we'd rather avoid, it's kind of preposterous that you wouldn't notice that all the white people with "white privilege" figuratively crying "white tears" because of their "white fragility" is, like, maybe a little bit offensive, and doubly so when the struggling white person who points out that they don't seem that privileged is then lectured about how dumb they are because "privilege" in this context means relative average advantage and your life can still be crap and it applies to you, and we can make fun of you too, because that's punching up.

So I don't think people who pick up the nomenclature always intend it in the sense that others take it, but really, the people coming up with and endorsing this stuff weren't all entirely unaware of what they were doing, again, unless they are spectacularly, breathtakingly bad at their jobs. ("Hmm, sore throat, persistent cough...I think you have a broken leg; I'll send you for a colonoscopy.")

But it has never made any sense to me how you get via that to a compassionate, uplifting society where we're all rooting for each other to succeed, and doing what we can to enable each other to do so.