DICTIONARY REVISES “RACISM” ENTRY AFTER WOMAN SEEKS CHANGES

Merriam-Webster is revising its entry on racism after intense lobbying by a recent college graduate in Missouri inspired by the protests and debates about what it means to be racist.

Currently, the dictionary’s entry contains three sections. The first defines racism 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.”

The second calls it 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 third section refers to “racial prejudice or discrimination.”

Peter Sokolowski, an editor at large at Merriam-Webster, said Wednesday that editors were working to revise the online entry for racism after the recent graduate, Kennedy Mitchum, wrote a series of emails stating her case.

“This entry has not been revised in decades,” he said, adding that it was not a new division of the word’s meanings, “but an improvement of the wording.”

As a student at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Mitchum had noticed in discussions about racism that white people sometimes defended their arguments by cutting and pasting the definition from the dictionary.

So in late May, as protests against racism and police violence grew, Mitchum, 22, wrote to the editors at Merriam-Webster to argue that the entry should be revised to better reflect how systemic racism was in society.

Alex Chambers, an editor at the dictionary, said that they revise definitions or add new ones “when we see large-scale changes happening in the language.”

After several exchanges, Chambers confirmed that the dictionary would revise the entry after the editorial staff discussed it.

Sokolowski said the revision will sharpen the language in the second section to better illustrate the ways racism can be systemic, and to include some examples. The point, he said, was to make the entry’s wording less “opaque.”

“People are looking up this word every single day,” Sokolowski said. “These are words that are very abstract, and therefore as ideas are very hard to put into words and that is one reason people go to the dictionary.”