The English language is so cruel!

If your skin weren't unfair, we could tell whether or not you are blushing with embarrassment when you ask lame questions.

I thought a bit more about your question, Randy, specifically how the words and their meanings evolved and how other languages treat the same concepts.

In Sanskrit, there are similar linguistic parallels for light and dark.
Around 1,600 BCE, the ochre-skinned, warrior Aryans from the Indus Valley invaded the subcontinent of India and soon developed the caste system to subjugate the original inhabitants, the chocolate-skinned Dravidians. The latter became the Sudras or untouchables, who were permitted to do only the most menial jobs, such as undertaking, butchery, tanning, leather-work, garbage disposal and cleaning. The Rig Veda contains an assertion that the Sudras were unclean because they carried diseases to which the Aryans had no immunity - but it also cast the Dravidians into work which exposed them to pathogens. 3,600 years later, the system still survives and attempts, since Ghandhi and nationalization, to wipe out the caste system struggle to succeed. Bollywood and culture still consider the "fair" skinned as more beautiful and desirable. This causes life-long pain to dark skinned Indians who learn from childhood to regard themselves as unattractive.
In the literature of the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Sanskrit word for light equates with spiritually higher or pure consciousness. This metaphor seems to exist across most Indo-European languages.
I thought at first that it might have arisen because sight is a dominant sense for many humans. The more light we have, the more clearly we see things. We need light to bounce off the objects in the world around us, to make it easier to find our way, to discern and understand patterns, to manipulate and create things. Without light, there is so much that we cannot know - like the exact nature of dark matter and energy and black holes, or the ecology at the bottom of the deepest oceans. So perhaps in this way light become a metaphor incorporated into words like "enlightenment" to refer to higher states of wisdom, awareness or knowledge, while darkness became a metaphor for ignorance, unconsciousness, neurosis, anti-social urges and evil. But does that idea have any validity?

So how about contrasting the Indo-European memes with a language evolved through millennia of isolation where blackness had no social significance?

60,000 years ago the Banda people of Indonesia were ocean going fishers with extraordinary skills in navigating with rafts - reaching New Guinea, Australia and the East Coast of Africa. The melanin spread evenly and thickly through their skin, jet matt black, never freckling, and their brow ridges shaded their small, black-irised eyes like caves. They had adapted to not just the sun but to its perpetual glare off the surface of salt water. And they became the Original peoples of Australia.
How do Aboriginal languages conceptualize light and dark? There are around 27 Aboriginal languages with around 250 dialects. In Noongar, "babanginy" means lightning.  Daytime = kedalup. Night time = kedalak. Fire = karl, kaala. Good = kwoba, kwop. Evil spirit = djenak. No knowledge (of something) = kaartdijinboort. Understanding = kaartdijin. SiIlly, stupid = kart warra (kart - head, warra - no good). In the sound kar or kaa there might be a correlation between the light from a fire and the light of knowledge or understanding -- but the correlation does not seem to spread consistently through the rest of the language. Nor is there any relationship between the darkness of night with the darkness of ignorance, unconsciousness or evil. In Pitjantjara: waru = fire, flame, heat.
I did a wide search through the languages that are still commonly used in their local areas and discovered that much of the material is classified as only available to indigenous speakers through isolated computers according to the enquirer's gender and level of initiation. I would have to travel thousands of kilometers to get to where these computers are, gain permission to learn and demonstrate a life-long commitment to the process.
The best I could come up with is that it looks very much as though our Original Australians did not equate light with conscious, fair, beautiful or just. It also seems probable that they do not equate light with knowledge and understanding because the root words do not remain consistent across the many languages.

So it seems possible that most Indo-European languages (not just English) have root-words which consciously or unconsciously equate light with positive concepts and darkness with negative ones, and that this often translates into racist metaphors with regard to black and dark-skinned people. It would mean that, at least to some extent, cognitive dissonance and racism are built into the memes of our speech. However, I think it would take a team of psychologists, sociologist and linguists working with many thousands of subjects to determine how much of prejudice comes from language, and how much from other forms of social conditioning.

Contemplating all this leads me to think your question would make a good topic for a PhD thesis in linguistics. One could compare the Indo-European languages with those of Africa, China, Japan, and pre-colonial North and South America in terms of homophones and their meanings. If there were consistently similar patterns one might conclude that humans form our concepts for these words from how we sense and view the world, but if the relevant phonemes and meanings were dissimilar one could infer biases of race, culture, and power.

Perhaps our modern attempts to reform the way we speak, to eliminate prejudicial thinking, have fallen far short of what is needed for equality, mutual respect, and peace.
Language does shape the way we think, and vice versa. Now I feel despair at how difficult it is to create universal positive social change. Imagine how the freedom-of-speechers might react.