A Woman Asked Merriam-Webster to Update its Definition of Racism and Now Officials Will Make the Change

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David Williams reports for CNN:

Kennedy Mitchum wasn’t expecting much when she emailed Merriam-Webster last month, but she wanted to let the dictionary publisher know that she thought its definition of the word racism was inadequate.

So she was surprised when an editor responded and even more surprised that the company agreed to update the entry.

Mitchum has gotten into a lot conversations about racism and injustice where people have pointed to the dictionary to prove that they’re not racist. It’s happened a lot more lately as the world reacts to the death of George Floyd while in the custody of four Minneapolis police officers.

The 22-year-old Mitchum recently graduated from Drake University and lives in Florissant, Missouri, just a few miles away from Ferguson, where protests over the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown helped solidify the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world,” she told CNN. “The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice it’s the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans.”

Merriam-Webster’s first definition of racism is “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”

Mitchum said many people she’s talked to use that to dismiss her concerns about racism and overlook broader issues of racial inequality because they don’t personally feel that way about people of color.

Mitchum said she sent her email on a Thursday night and got a reply from editor Alex Chambers the next morning. After a few emails, Chambers agreed that the entry should be updated and said a new definition is being drafted.

“This revision would not have been made without your persistence in contacting us about this problem,” Chambers said in the email, which was provided to CNN. “We sincerely thank you for repeatedly writing in and apologize for the harm and offense we have caused in failing to address this issue sooner.” Read more at CNN.

{Matzav.com}


4 COMMENTS

  1. Such stupid out of control liberalism. Nu, when will we have to start paying reparations? Will we have to bow down and apologize to any black we see, everyday, or only once a week? Keep these things in mind when you enter the voting booth in November.

  2. I’m not (directly) coming to address whether the original version is a good definition of racism or not. But regarding the accuracy of the description itself:
    “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities”.
    Well that is empirically true.
    So every honest scientist and geneticist must be a racist according to that definition.

    “and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”.
    If the first clause is true, then this clause is a necessarily true consequence also.

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