Merriam-Webster Dictionary Changes Definition Of “Nude” After One Person Complains It’s A Racist “Microaggression” | Weasel Zippers
Stop the World, I want to get off.
Via WaPo:
What’s “nude” mean to you?
Until recently, anyone searching the Merriam-Webster dictionary for the word would have come across the following
• having no clothes on
• of or involving people who have no clothes on
• having the color of a white person’s skin
To Luis Torres, the third definition wasn’t just wrong. It was racist: a “micro aggression” toward people of color.
So Torres, an incoming sophomore at Ithaca College, started an Internet campaign called Nude Awakening to shame Merriam-Webster and coax it into changing its entry.
“This is something small that most white people, myself included, take for granted,” he told Mic.com. “I started doing research around Band-Aids, which led to nude fashion, which led to me discovering the Merriam-Webster definition of nude. It blew my mind that an academic source was perpetuating this same racism.” […]
Merriam-Webster withered under the pressure. Some time this month, the dictionary quietly changed its entry for “nude” to something more palatable. Gone was the reference to “a white person’s skin,” replaced by the following:
1. lacking something essential especially to legal validity
2
a : devoid of a natural or conventional covering; especially : not covered by clothing or a drape
b (1) : having a color (as pale beige or tan) that matches the wearer’s skin tones (2) : giving the appearance of nudity