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.”
On July 14, a.k.a. National Nude Day, Torres urged people to “demand Merriam-Webster Dictionary change its racist definition of the word ‘nude.'”
More than 800 responded, flooding the dictionary’s entry with angry comments and attacking Merriam-Webster on Twitter.
“Hey @Merriam-Webster Dictionary, did you know you’re the only dictionary with a racist definition of the word ‘nude’?” many of the critics wrote. “Remove the third definition from this word to get with the times. #NudeAwakening”
Others tailored the message to fit their own personal fury.
“This is disgusting,” one woman wrote. “Nude is a state of being, not a skin tone.”
“Now, black models were a leap forward, but NUDE black models?! That must be, frankly, impossible,” wrote another woman. “It’s most certainly never happened. Defining ‘nude’ to specifically be the color of a white person’s skin is pure bigotry and is plain offensive. How can you define a shade as another’s individualized flesh tone when there’s not even a concrete definition of WHAT a white person’s coloring is?”
