The word racism

   Was playing around with this word and decided to look up a lexical definition. I was surprised that many online definitions have one definition as, "racial prejudice or discrimination." Or, "discrimination or prejudice based on  race."

Examples are from mirriam websters dictionary, and ask.com..

So to me, it seems these defintions could include a very large category of people if you are to understand the definitons as something like, "discrimination based on race." As the word discrimination could be understood as the ability to distinguish.. Essentially, the definition could be translated as the ability to distinguish based on race, which is an ability most people have via sight or linguistics.

Does this make most people racist? Is this an acceptable interpretation even on a stretch, and a problem with language, or is this just a problem with lexical, non precise definitions? Would seem excluding the word discriminate would tighten up the definition a lot. Please help.

  Well, my point is more on the level of folly of language, and how things CAN be interpreted. I'm not agreeing with the way it could possibly be interpreted, I certainly don't want to believe everyone is racist.. I'm only half jesting, half serious and pointing out that it could be interpreted as I explained.

  I'm a philosophy student, and enjoy looking at things in as many ways as possible. One of the funny things thats related to this, when you say I'm not using the word as intended, a person cant deduce intent on how words are to be used from words that have several meanings unless there is a clear amphiboly; Tom Cruise is a star, therefore planets must revolve around him.. Thats a clear amphiboly, however in a dictionary, there is no clear way to know when the context of a word changes, or if a word has different meanings in cases where the word in question is a noun.

Monkey for example is a word with many noun meanings, how is one supposed to know that racism isn't a word with noun meaning without some sort of rule built into a dictionary?

    Well, a lot of philosophers are lovers/students of knowledge. Think about what it is to have knowlege, the value of knowledge might give you an idea as to why it's worth discussing and arguing over. One thing philosophers tend to value a lot is precision and clarity so that mistakes, or misinterpretations are not easily made. On one hand language having several meanings is artful, like Shakespere. But on the other hand, when you want to communicate certain ideas, precision is extremely important. What would happen if expiration dates on gallons of milk, or technical medical journals were as whimsical as interpretations of Shakespere?

    I personally would like the word racism to be defined with precision, so that people like myself have a very hard time lawyering it to suit some other end, like making a muck of the definition. I was actually hoping I made some sort of technical mistake which could be pointed out. So far it seems I haven't made a technical mistake since my mistake has to do with the intent of how a word is supposed to be interpreted. Intent is something that is hard to prove, so its best to not venture into such a category when dealing with something like a lexical definition.. IMHO lexical definitions should be as precise as possible.

   If theres a technical rule I missed, and there is no problem with the definition as it is, please help me understand it. I don't consider intent a technical mistake.

I'm a philosophy student, and enjoy looking at things in as many ways as possible.

Read John Searle if you haven't already.  He speaks of The Background - all the knowledge we have as the result of having lived in this world for a certain number of years - the practical knowledge about the world that we bring to bear in interpreting all language we hear or read.

One of his comments along these lines involves the word "cut".  He says that in these two sentences:

Cut the grass!
Cut the cake!

the word "cut" does not have two different meanings.
Nevertheless, upon hearing them we do not imagine getting down on all fours on the lawn and going at the grass with a cake knife, nor do we imagine running a lawnmower across the cake!

I think the lesson Searle delivers here (and I don't think he'd be pleased with my characterization of it as a lesson) is that you need more than a dictionary to understand language. 

CJ

Absiolutely, I too see other people who are darker or lighter than me, speak a different language from me, doing things differently from me - but that is the dictionary definition of  "racism". Whether it is negative or positive to regard people as different is the philosophical discussion that this started with.