John McWhorter: "The Dictionary Definition of Racism Has to Change"

By artappraiser on Thu, 06/25/2020 - 7:53pm |

If racism stops meaning prejudice and starts meaning disparities, it would mean that basically everything, everywhere on planet earth, is racist, which might be the point https://t.co/UrNc1uyxfS
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) June 25, 2020

URL:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/dictionary-definition-racism-has-change/613324/

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continuation of Zilani's comments related to McWhorter's article:

National Spelling Bee could be considered extremely racist, despite it being 100 percent based on a process that can't discriminate by skin color.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) June 25, 2020

Overall, the word racism doesn't have very much meaning these days, more precise words like discrimination, bias, prejudice, and disparities seem to convey more information as it is. Also, many types of related bias that don't neatly fit into racism around.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) June 25, 2020

That being said at a certain point McWhorter is right. If a word starts being used in a different way across society the dictionary has to keep up. I still think most normies do not think have a definition of racism so vast that everything is racist, but if they ever did...
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) June 25, 2020

by artappraiser on Thu, 06/25/2020 - 7:58pm

McWhorter realizes that he is out of step.

If I had it my way—which I won’t—we would allow that racism now refers to a societal state, and revive prejudice to refer to attitudinal bias. Prejudiced was once, after all, the word of choice for racist bias. Racist only took over starting in about 1970, with a major uptick after 1980. Here is Sammy Davis Jr. taunting Archie Bunker on All in the Family in 1972. Note that his usage of prejudiced is now antique; the word would be racist today:

If you were prejudiced, you’d go around saying you were better than anyone else in the world, but I can honestly say, after spending these marvelous moments with you, you ain’t better than anybody!

by rmrd0000 on Thu, 06/25/2020 - 9:15pm

I am guessing Prof. McWhorter, Linguistics/Comparative Lit, Columbia University might perhaps give you a D+ for interpreting the quoted text that way. He's the opposite of "out of step" here! He's specifically separating out how he would like to see the word used optimally, from the actual way the word is being used in general discourse. He's putting on his linguistics professor hat and saying: this is the way the word is being used. In step totally. He's saying the dictionaries are what's out of step.

You're clearly approaching the text with a closed mind, reading your own thoughts into it, as you see him as a political enemy. He's not doing politics here, he's doing linguistics. The desire is to make people communicate more accurately.

by artappraiser on Thu, 06/25/2020 - 9:43pm

McWhorter

If I had it my way—which I won’t—we would allow that racism now refers to a societal state, and revive prejudice to refer to attitudinal bias.

Read the entire sentence. Do you see prejudiced as an attitude making a return? We will talking about people and society as racist. I gave myself an A+.

McWhoter again

But in my idealized English, people would be prejudiced while a society would exhibit racism.

by rmrd0000 on Thu, 06/25/2020 - 11:18pm

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