As protests against systemic racism and police violence continue to swell throughout the United States and beyond, public interest in learning about race and anti-racism has reached unprecedented heights. In this public quest for up-to-date and accurate information about racism and anti-racism efforts, dictionaries serve as essential tools for finding and legitimizing knowledge. Unfortunately, the definition of racism found in most dictionaries is inaccurate and misleading.

We call on all dictionary editorial staff to update their definitions of the word racism to account for its systemic nature and to accurately reflect the real-world, professional, and scholarly usage of the term. Most dictionary definitions today only address racism as an individual matter: “individual prejudice or discrimination against a group based on their race” or “the belief in the superiority of one’s own race or inferiority of another.” Despite the nearly universal consensus within the top-selling books on race and anti-racism, academic race scholarship, and in anti-racist and activist circles who all define racism as systemic, few dictionary definitions currently reflect this reality.

Thanks to the efforts of Kennedy Mitchum, Merriam-Webster will be updating its definition shortly. Merriam-Webster's editorial manager Peter Sokolowski told the BBC: "This is the kind of continuous revision that is part of the work of keeping the dictionary up to date, based on rigorous criteria and research we employ in order to describe the language as it is actually used.” By not following suit, other dictionaries risk falling behind contemporary usage.

Experts in Critical Race Theory from English, Communication Studies, Composition, and other disciplines have, in fact, been using systemic definitions of racism for more than a decade. Foundational race scholarship has defined racism as that which “creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial signification and identities” rather than merely a matter of explicit beliefs or attitudes (emphasis added).[i] These structures–including legal, educational, housing-related, and social,[ii] to name a few[iii]–are crucial to the dictionary definition of racism as readers can more fully understand the deeply embedded nature of racism, the by-products of which are now swelling to the surface of national and international conversations. Definitions and examples like those below offer a much needed corrective.

• Racism, noun. The totality of policies and practices embedded within established institutions that lead to the unequal life chances, conditions of vulnerability, and even premature death for historically marginalized and oppressed populations, and which does not require individual intent.[iv]
• Racism, noun. The structural formation and production of a perpetual precarity that results in the routine denial of basic human and civil rights to Black, Indigenous, and non-Black people of color.[v] 
• Antiblackness, or antiblack racism, noun. A specific kind of racism targeting Black people. It is a concept that helps explain how racism disproportionately affects Black communities and pushes back against the assumption that all racialized populations are affected by racism in the same way.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary made the responsible choice in agreeing to update their definition. Other dictionaries that could follow suit include Oxford English Dictionary, The Free Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Dictionary.com, Webster’s New World Dictionary, The Cambridge Online Dictionary, and Google Dictionary, to name only a few of the most popular.

This petition follows Kennedy Mitchum’s successful example and was written with her knowledge and support. As a collective of anti-racist advocates, educators, concerned citizens, and students, backed by professional race scholars from many disciplines, we believe the current, narrow definition reflects a severely outdated perspective that undermines how systemic racism impacts the lives of Black, Indigenous, and non-Black people of color. Making this change would signal a commitment to definitional accuracy and accountability to the general public that deserves an understanding of the term racism that reflects current usage trends as well as the consensus of academic experts.  

Sign this petition if you agree that the current dictionary definitions of racism need to be changed to more accurately reflect the systemic nature of racism and that dictionaries need to be held accountable for definitional accuracy.

Signed

Walid Afifi, Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara

Kristiana Lilly Báez, PhD Candidate, University of Iowa

Lisa Corrigan, Professor, University of Arkansas

Ashley Hall, Assistant Professor, Illinois State University

Matthew Houdek, Lecturer, Rochester Institute of Technology

Martin Law, PhD Candidate, Indiana University

Raven Maragh-Lloyd, Assistant Professor, Gonzaga University

Ersula Ore, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Karrieann Soto Vega, Assistant Professor, University of Kentucky

Endnotes

[i]  Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge, p. 128.

[ii]  Hall, S. (1996). Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance. In H. Baker, M. Diawara, & R. Lindeborg (Eds.), Black British Cultural Studies (pp. 16-61).

[iii] Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

[iv] Sadiyia Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007)

[v] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in GLobalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)