The philologists and etymologists at Merriam-Webster are succumbing to the mob, and it’s a piteous sight.
Now they are changing the definition of the word “racism” to reflect politically correct nonsense that makes a muddle of a concept that once was clear. This is Orwellian doublespeak, serving the goal of “destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.”
The original, simple definition of racism merely involved an attribution, usually negative, of certain characteristics to an individual based solely on their racial identity, usually combined with negative assumptions of the individual’s worth because of it. Or, simply, “racial prejudice.” Webster’s long ago slightly expanded that to include “systemic” factors involving “a doctrine or political program … designed to execute” racist principles.
For decades, though, that hasn’t been enough for hard leftists. The radicals have been trying to change the definition so that power relationships, an entirely different concept, are part and parcel of racism. The explicit goal was to say that only white people can be racist because white people enjoy all the systemic power, and racism can flow only from the powerful against the powerless.
Thus, racial hatred from black people toward white people would no longer be racism, and thus not denounceable — and perhaps even justifiable. This is, of course, an outlandish moral position, but it serves the radical, subversive agenda in ways too multiple to list here.
The radicals have been at least partially successful, though, in spreading this confusion. Now, even well-meaning people say that if racism does not include a systemic element related to power, it isn’t racism at all.
Recent Drake University graduate Kennedy Mitchum wrote to Merriam-Webster to ask it to change the definition to say racism entails only “prejudice combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin color.” And Webster’s says it will comply when it issues its next edition.
Here’s the problem with that. Existing words already allow for great specificity when discussing issues related to prejudice. Prejudice with a racial connotation is racism. Racism, combined with some action made on its basis, is racial discrimination. Racism involving a system is systemic racism. Racism involving a system of, and nefarious use of, power disparities is systemic racial discrimination. Policy based on any racial assumptions, with or without regard to whether those assumptions are negative, positive, or neutral, is racialism.
In sum, just as with most other words, the basic word “racism” can be used in different circumstances depending on what other words are used to modify it. That’s how language usually works.
Contrarily, if racism is no longer racism unless it involves power relationships, then two bad things happen. First, there is no basic word describing racial animus based on prejudice. The word “racism” that was fundamentally a description of an attitude alone is now lost. It can no longer be modified with the examples above, in different ways, to achieve precision of meaning.
Second, if racism isn’t racism unless it involves an active power relationship, then the attitudinal aspect of it no longer will be enough to merit condemnation. The moral aspect, the implicit stricture against race-based hatred of any kind, is lost.
If an impoverished, disabled white person in an entirely black neighborhood in a black-majority city is otherwise entirely powerless but yells out the N-word, will the new definition mean they aren’t racist because they enjoy no power? That’s absurd and borderline obscene.
The existing definition works because it makes logical and philological sense. The new definition is pure politics — and we should all be prejudiced against the politicized ruination of language.
