Merriam-Webster is incorporating a definition of racism that seems to borrow from Black Lives Matter.
By David Isaac, World Israel News
The culture warriors outraged by the killing of George Floyd have set their sights on a number of targets: Police, statues, corporate boardrooms. Now they’re coming for the dictionary.
None of their targets have put up much of a fight. The dictionary is rolling over, too. For Merriam-Webster all it took was an email from a 22 year old.
Now it’s changing its definition of “racism” to include systemic aspects that lead to discrimination.
“Kennedy Mitchum, 22, of Florissant, told KMOV-TV that she was inspired to email the dictionary publisher after getting into arguments with others about the definition,” Fox News reported on Wednesday.
“I know what racism is, I’ve experienced it time and time and time again in a lot of different ways, so enough is enough. So, I emailed them about how I felt about it. Saying this needs to change,” Mitchum said.
“I basically told them they need to include that there is systematic oppression on people. It’s not just ‘I don’t like someone,’ it’s a system of oppression for a certain group of people,” she said.
The new definition appears to draw from ideas of the Black Lives Matter movement, which asserts that America is inherently racist, built on white supremacy and that blacks in the U.S. are “systematically targeted for demise.”
Merriam-Webster currently 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.”
Now a second definition will be added.
“Our second definition is divided to express, first, explicit institutional bias against people because of their race, and, second, a broader implicit bias that can also result in an asymmetrical power structure,” Peter Sokolowski, the editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster, said in a statement to Fox News.
Writing in FrontPage magazine on June 10, columnist Daniel Greenfield says that Merriam-Webster’s decision is a partial surrender, if not a complete one as it’s also keeping its original definition.
He says that the first definition in the dictionary is one that “black nationalists and their leftist allies really hate.”
The reason he says is “because it raises the possibility that Farrakhan, Sharpton, or Tamika Mallory can be racist. Instead they define racism as a system of oppression so that only people with power can be racist and only white people have power. Therefore Farrakhan can’t possibly be racist.”
He says defining racism as a system plays into the hands of black nationalists because it prevents racist ideas of minorities from being treated as such.