Merriam-Webster has updated its dictionary definition of racism following an email exchange with a woman who got fed up with the whites using the dictionary during racism debates.
Kennedy Mitchum, 22, sent Merriam-Webster editors an email about the definition of the word racism on May 28, as reported by The New York Times. In her mail, she requested an updated definition that addresses the institutional aspects of racism.
“Racism is not only prejudice against a certain race due to the color of a person’s skin, as it states in your dictionary,” Mitchum wrote. “It is both prejudices combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin color.
Surprisingly to her, Merriam-Webster responded a day later and bought her idea for a change. Their conversation led to the update.
Originally, racism is defined by Merriam-Webster as “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.”
Moreover, the newest update kept the original definition but added two more definitions. The first of the two states racism as “a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles” and “a political or social system founded on racism.”
The second also defines racism as “racial prejudice or discrimination.”
According to BBC, Mitchum was motivated to send the email after she encountered defensive white people who use the older definition during arguments.
“I was just speaking on my social media about racism and just about how the things I was experiencing in my own school and my own college,” she told the BBC. “There were a lot of things that were racist, but it wasn’t as blatant.”
She further explained that dissenters would quote the older definition for her when she shares her experiences online.
“Some troll was messaging me trying to say, ‘You don’t understand what racism truly is,” Kennedy Mitchum recalled to the British media.
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Mitchum is a recent graduate of Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. According to her, they also bring up her educational credentials to prove she didn’t experience prejudice.
“They were saying: ‘You’re in school, so what do you mean? You have privileges as well.’ I said it’s not about that, it’s about the hurdles that I had to jump over because of the color of my skin and the systems that are in place.”
Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski, admitted the definition might be updated again when the newest edition of the dictionary is released.
“This second definition covers the sense that Ms. Mitchum was seeking, and we will make its wording even more clear in our next release,” Sokolowski told The Des Moines Register. “Revisions of this kind are an essential part of the work of keeping the dictionary up-to-date.”
The Dictionary editor, Alex Chambers, on the other hand, said the dictionary typically updates its entries based on real-world usage and doesn’t reflect any opinion. However, he conceded the change was long overdue.
“While our focus will always be on faithfully reflecting the real-world usage of a word, not on promoting any particular viewpoint, we have concluded that omitting any mention of the systemic aspects of racism promotes a certain viewpoint in itself,” Chambers explained to The New York Times. “It also does a disservice to readers of all races.”
