The Anti-Defamation League, one of the most storied civil rights organizations in America, has been scrambling today to change its definition of “racism” in the wake of news that television personality Whoopi Goldberg is on the verge of being fired for comments about the Holocaust. 

Those comments would have been kosher under a definition of racism that was featured on the ADL’s website at the very moment she opined on the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe. Less than two years ago, the ADL, under increasingly “woke” management, had put up on its website a definition of racism similar to that Ms. Goldberg used.

That definition seemed to narrow racism to hostility to persons “of color.” No sooner had Ms. Goldberg become embroiled in controversy than the ADL put up a new definition of racism, one that left Ms. Goldberg twisting in the wind. It abandoned the narrow definition, which had been cooked up in the summer 2020, during a time of widespread violence and protest.   

Before July 2020, the ADL’s definition of racism would have struck many as unobjectionable. It invoked “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another,” and that “a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.”

However, that changed dramatically. For the past year and a half, the ADL redefined racism to mean “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” This created a remarkable situation where an organization that tasked itself with stopping “the defamation of the Jewish people” was using a definition of racism that excluded most Jews.

In this context, Ms. Goldberg’s comments that the Holocaust was “white people doing it to white people” and “y’all going to fight amongst yourselves” and that the murder of the Jews of Europe was “not about race” were congruent, in a suddenly embarrasing way, with the ADL’s evolving understanding of prejudice. 

While Ms. Goldberg was embroiled in a firestorm, the ADL was busy scrubbing the new intersectionality and critical race theory-inspired definition from its website. In its place the organization proposes yet another definition of racism, this time labeled “interim.” 

The interim one reads, “Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.” Attached to this new definition is a long note from the national director of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, titled, “Getting it Right in Defining Racism.”

In it, Mr. Greenblatt, who succeeded Abraham Foxman and has been moving the ADL leftward, explains that the intersectional definition was “the truth, it’s just not the whole truth.” He makes no mention of the controversy involving Ms. Goldberg, though he laments that ​​”with enough outrage and an Internet browser, a zealot can ‘uncover’ a conspiracy in every digital breadcrumb.”

What only Mr. Greenblatt can answer is whether that outrage would have been enough for his organization to change course in the absence of the daytime television host’s controversy. The ADL has not publicly acknowledged its latest swerve on the definition of racism beyond Mr. Greenblatt’s note on the website.     

Dictionary writers keeping one eye on the news cycle is nothing new. In the fall of 2020, the word-watchers at Merriam-Webster affixed the word “offensive” to their definition of “sexual preference” in real time as Amy Coney Barrett was, during her confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, lambasted by Democrats for using the phrase “sexual preference.”

The ADL did not respond to repeated requests for comment.