Kennedy Mitchum is a recent graduate of Drake University in Iowa
New York:
The Merriam-Webster American Reference Dictionary will change its definition of the word racism at the suggestion of a young black woman, who wanted it to better reflect the oppression of people of color.
Kennedy Mitchum, recently a graduate of Drake University in Iowa, contacted Merriam-Webster, who has published dictionaries since 1847, to suggest an update to the term.
“I basically told them that they should include that there was systematic oppression against a group of people,” she told local CBS affiliate KMOV. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, I don’t like someone.'”
Merriam-Webster’s editorial director Peter Sokolowski confirmed to AFP that the definition would be changed at Mitchum’s request.
The dictionary currently offers three definitions of racism, and Sokolowski said the second definition touches on Mitchum’s point – but “we will make it even clearer in our next version.”
In the current version of the second definition, racism is “a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to apply its principles” and “a political or social system based on racism”.
“This is the kind of continuous revision that is part of the dictionary updating work, based on rigorous criteria and research that we use to describe the language as it is actually used,” said Sokolowski.
One of the dictionary editors told Mitchum that the definitions of the other words “racial or racially related” would also be updated, without specifying which ones.
“We apologize for the harm and the offense we caused by not addressing this problem sooner,” the editor wrote, according to a message posted by Drake University and retweeted by Mitchum.
The Merriam-Webster site, where definitions are available for free, welcomed nearly 50 million unique visitors in May, according to the SimilarWeb site.
Merriam-Webster’s Twitter account has also gone viral in recent years, Buzzfeed calling it “the most sass dictionary on Twitter”.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
