The Trump administration does not believe in systemic racism. But it's so real that Merriam-Webster is changing the definition of racism to include it.

• President Donald Trump has been dismissive of conversations on systemic racism, and some of his top advisers don't believe it exists at all.
• But research shows that systemic racism is pervasive in the US, particularly in terms of the treatment of Black Americans by police and the criminal justice system more broadly.
• Systemic racism is so real that Merriam-Webster just decided to revise its entry on "racism" to "make the idea of systemic or institutional racism even more explicit in the wording of the definition."

President Donald Trump last Friday shushed a Black reporter, PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, when she asked about his plans to address systemic racism in the US. The moment typified his administration's dismissive stance on the issue.

Though there's a mountain of evidence and research showing that systemic racism is pervasive in American society, Trump's top advisers don't believe it's real — particularly when it comes to law enforcement.

"No, I don't think there's systemic racism," national security adviser Robert O'Brien recently told CNN. "I think 99.9% of our law enforcement officers are great Americans. Many of them are African American, Hispanic, Asian."

"I think there's racism in the United States still but I don't think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist," Attorney General William Barr said during an appearance on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "I understand the distrust, however, of the African-American community given the history in this country."

Dr. Ben Carson, the only Black person in Trump's Cabinet, on Sunday said that he experienced "real systemic racism" while he was growing up, but went on to say "that kind of thing is very uncommon now."

"I do not think that we have a systemic racism problem with law enforcement officers across this country," acting Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf said on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday.

Larry Kudlow, the president's top economic adviser, on Wednesday said, "I don't believe there is systemic racism in the US I'm not going to go into a long riff on it."

But systemic racism is so real that Merriam-Webster is revising its definition to include it, after it was challenged by a recent college graduate, Kennedy Mitchum, to provide an update, per the New York Times.

Mitchum, 22, who recently graduated from Drake University in Iowa, emailed Merriam-Webster in late May, stating: "Racism is not only prejudice against a certain race due to the color of a persons skin, as it states in your dictionary."

"It is both prejudice combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin color," Mitchum added. She was inspired to contact Merriam-Webster after noticing that white people sometimes cited the dictionary's definition of racism in defense of their arguments online.

Peter Sokolowski, an editor at large at Merriam-Webster, on Wednesday announced the editors of the dictionary are now working to revise online entry for "racism."

"This entry has not been revised in decades," Sokolowski said. "We will make the idea of systemic or institutional racism even more explicit in the wording of the definition."

There's a wide body of evidence that systemic racism is real

Many academics have long stated that racism is not simply overt acts of discrimination that one might associate with groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and define it as "prejudice plus power." In other words, racism is prejudice combined with institutional or systemic control.

In the US, where Black people are disproportionately incarcerated and killed by police, researchers have found widespread evidence of systemic racism in policing.

A Northeastern-Harvard study released in April, for example, found Black Americans are at greater risk of being killed by police, even though they are less likely to pose an objective threat to law enforcement. Researchers looked through shooting deaths by police across 27 states in 2014 and 2015 for the study, which was based on details from police and medical-examiner reports by the National Violent Death Reporting System.

"One in 15 firearm deaths is at the hands of police; among African-Americans it's about one in 10," Northeastern professor Matt Miller said in a report on the study. "Which isn't to say that these shootings are all unjustified. But it sure makes you feel like we should try really hard to figure out how to use less lethal ways of arresting someone's threatening behavior."

Though Black people make up roughly 13% of the US population, Washington Post data shows they are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.

The issue of systemic racism has been at the forefront of the national discourse in recent weeks following the brutal death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police. An officer knelt on Floyd's neck for roughly eight minutes, which ultimately killed him. The disturbing incident was filmed and widely shared on social media, catalyzing nationwide protests and calls for reform to policing.

Discussions on systemic racism also go well beyond law enforcement.

In explaining why Black Americans have been disproportionately effected by COVID-19, experts have also pointed to systemic racism and racial inequities in terms of access to health care and other resources.

"Sometimes when you're in the middle of a crisis, like we are now with the coronavirus, it really does have, ultimately, shine a very bright light on some of the real weaknesses and foibles in our society," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top expert on infectious disease, said in April.

"Health disparities have always existed for the African American community," Fauci added. "But here again, with the crisis, how it's shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is."

Amid the recent protests spurred by Floyd's death, over 1,000 health professionals signed a letter urging against using the coronavirus pandemic as the basis for shutting down the demonstrations.

"Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities," the letter said. "They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress."

"Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported," the letter added, while also advocating for public health best practices (social distancing, wearing masks etc.) to be maintained to the fullest extent during the demonstrations.