Smile when you call us that
Oops.
When woke Language Reform turns out to be not so much a reform as a mistake:
As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.
That is, non-Hispanic academics and activists, apparently.
But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.
Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.
More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.
You know what that sounds like? It sounds like women not wanting to be called “cis” thank you very much, and wanting nothing to do with anyone who does call us that.
But with the difference that we often hear politicans say: “We want to do good things for Latinx people, and increase their visibility” (never mind that they’re often lying), but we never heard them say “We want to do good things for cis women, and increase their visibility” — they don’t say that even as a lie.
My daughter complained at school that “Latinx” was an inappropriate term to refer to people of Hispanic descent (like her), as the word is unpronounceable in Spanish and is not used by Hispanics to describe themselves, and she was told that that’s just the word the school uses and it’s not up to her to decide how people refer to her.
Now if she’d said she was trans-of Hispanic descent it would have been a different story.
(But honestly – how rude.)
My irony meter just exploded.
The fact that Latinx is an inherently Anglo term is what makes it just so perverse. In a microcosm, an example of how the American left/Democrats have lost touch with, and therefore lost much of the support of, the growing Hispanic population – a population that actually has little to definite it collectively beyond the simple fact of the language that the Latinx label cheerfully disregards.
There used to be a time when middle-class white people adopting different language or practices to show respect for people from other cultures made at least some attempt to engage with those cultures. The idea being to ensure that whatever they did in adopting language and practices actually showed respect. At least, that’s how I remember it. These days it seems those with social capital do whatever the hell makes them feel good and worthy, then wonder why people are calling them fuckwits.
iknklast, my son had the same problem in college. He told me he was the only Hispanic kid in a class full of Anglos and he was trying to tell them that he found the term “Latinx” unacceptable and they were trying to tell him how wrong he was to think so. They felt they were so much more woke than him so he must be wrong. He said look, here you are the dominant culture telling a minority to shut up and answer to what you want to call him. How is that progressive?
Rob, those days were long ago. “Latinx” is a term invented by people with a non-gendered language specifically intended to chastise Hispanics for inheriting a gendered language. Anglo say: you Hispanics are talking wrong, and you Hispanics must repeat after me.
Papito,
The term they’re using in their heads, if only subconsciously, is two syllables and four letters shorter than the full “Hispanics”.
More generally, it seems fairly clear to me that the modern discourse around “white privilege” and “dismantling white supremacy” and “decolonising” this or that is just a twenty-first century re-skin of the White Man’s Burden, flavoured with a dash of last century’s white guilt and academic jargon.
Much like TRAs have redefined “feminism” as a movement granting license to ignore and bully and even physically assault women with ideological righteousness, the racial Elect (in John McWhorter’s usage) has given itself license to shout-down and bully and disregard the actual voices of racial, ethnic, and especially economically downtrodden people. It is their duty to better the rest of us, whether we like it or not.
The University system as we know it today was invented by European colonial powers in order to give their administrators a sufficient education to become the grease in the cogs of empire. Before that they were medieval theological institutions. It is good, from time to time, to remember this.
Yeah, the whole “Latinx” thing is largely an attempt by Dems and the Left to boil down the various Hispanic-American communities (which not only are widely disparate, but often at odds with one another) into a single unit, much as they have with other constituencies.
DDW: Given human moral fallibility, can false consciousness ever end up as anything but an ideology which exists to maintain the power of the class which has assumed the privilege of labellng other people’s consciousness as false?
Alan,
The real trick is in understanding, and accepting, that there is no such thing as true consciousness in the first place; it is all false consciousness, filtered through the fallible and unreliable sensory processors we call brains, and can only ever be an approximation of an ultimately unattainable underlying truth — if such an underlying truth even exists.
This is just as true of our notions of justice and fairness and righteousness as it is of our senses of smell or sight or sound; it is not only possible, not only probably, but rather it is certain that everything we think we know about morality or a righteous life or the proper way of comporting ourselves is wrong in some fundamental way. It simply cannot be otherwise. We are eyeless fish in a lightless cave, responding to stimuli, snatched from the void and born into a darkness whose contours we can dimly sense but never really know, and certainly never transcend before the void claims us once again.
As soon as we stop searching for the truth of the matter, as soon as we say we have found it, as soon as we build a world whose foundations can only hold so long as this truth is continuously affirmed — in other words, as soon as we claim to have attained or obtained consciousness — we have lost. All consciousness, or at least all claims to consciousness, cannot but be assertions of false consciousness.
Every prophet is a false prophet, and every priest, a liar.
Freemage, it’s not even that. Lumping Hispanics together into a single group would be an improvement over what “Latinx” does. Creating a unified Latin American group is what Univision has done so successfully, and as the article says, they never say “Latinx.” When I saw what Univision was doing in creating a broad yet unified Hispanic audience I was amazed.
What “Latinx” says is that Hispanics are using their own language wrong, and they need Anglos to fix it for them. It’s colossally demeaning, and utterly unnecessary. The word is used in English, and English doesn’t have genders (either to fix, or be left alone). If they just used a different word, it would entirely obviate the need. Using “Latino” in English in the first place is a patronizing appropriation of Spanish. It gained popularity because Anglos didn’t want to say Hispanic and are too lazy to say Latin American. The problems don’t start only once you get to “Latinx.”
Mostly, Hispanic people don’t dislike being referred to as Hispanic, they’re not squeamish about the idea of Spain (and, BTW, Spanish people don’t refer to themselves as “Hispanic,” they’re Spanish). The idea that we shouldn’t use “Hispanic” because of the reference to Spain is that kind of woke racism McWhorter talks about. It’s because nice Anglo liberals don’t want to be reminded, they want to project more otherness on Hispanics, and on more than just a linguistic level.
I used to teach Spanish at the college level, and the degree of ignorance of the incoming college student can hardly be exaggerated. Most Americans don’t think there are any white people, or black people, in Mexico, or elsewhere in Latin America. They think that “Hispanic” is a race. They don’t know that people speak Portuguese in Brazil. The term “Latinx” helps cover up all that ignorance.
Crap, you got me up on my soapbox now. The reason it’s important, in America, to use the term “Hispanic” is because of the unique history of Hispanic peoples in America. It’s all well and good to want to use the term “Latin American” if we want to talk about other people who may have immigrated here from the South, but Hispanics hold the distinction of the country moving to them, rather than vice versa. Hispanics aren’t a foreign, immigrant minority in the United States, they’re a linguistic minority (and more than one cultural minority) that has been present here since before the United States existed. Lumping Hispanics in with other Latin Americans is a form of denial of this history. The US never stole half of Brazil, or occupied Surinam. People who ended up in the US because the border crossed them are in a fundamentally different position.
Don’t Latinx Me, Bro!
The term Latin America was a 19th century neologism. It was coined by the French, who were in a struggle with Britain for commercial and political influence in the newly independent republics, ( and Brazil) as a deliberate way to emphasise the suppossed naturalness of their own presence as fellow speakers of a latinate language, in contract with the alien presence of anglophone Brits.
I’m not sure how relevant that is but I find it interesting.
If you want to dodge the gendering of latino/latina, you have the perfectly usable term ‘Latin.’ But that doesn’t sound coyly ‘ethnic’ enough. I haven’t heard anyone speak the pseudo-work ‘Latinx’ yet. Do they actually say ‘latinks?’ Could you come up with a more tin-eared clunker?
The French and Spanish (and Portuguese, let’s not forget) during their conquest and subjugation of the Americas had something more in common with one another than just their language, as well; the speakers of these tongues all mixed far more readily with the indigenous peoples than did the Anglophone settlers.
In Canada, the descendants of these intermingled peoples are called “Métis”, and largely speak French; in Central and South America, they are called “Mestizo” (or, in Brasil, “Mestiço”), obviously descending from a common word which shares its etymology with “mixture”. And while in Canada, the Métis population is a small ethnic minority and only one among many so-called First Nations, depending on how you look at it, Mestizos make up between a plurality and a 90-percent majority of most Latin American nations. These “mixed” peoples are in every case a self-organised ethnic (or even racial) group distinct both from Europeans and their descendants and the remnant indigenous peoples in the countries in question.
There is no comparable recognition of a group of Native-Anglo “mixed” population which rises to the level of a distinct ethnicity. Though cross-breeding (for lack of a better term) certainly happened, and continues to happen, it tends to happen along the “one drop” model pioneered in North America (itself largely developed in response to the mixed black-white people in Louisiana after Jefferson bought the land off of Napoleon); that is, if a person has enough “Indian blood” in them to be recognised as Native America, they are so recognised, and if they can “pass” as white, sometimes they choose to do so and in effect assimilate into white society.
Their children and children’s children are then simply white, and some of those children’s children’s children hear anecdotes of a great grandparent who was a “full-blooded” member of whatever tribe, but they go on being white (Elisabeth Warren’s foolishness to the contrary).
I’m not exactly sure what this says about the difference between Anglo and Iberian-French colonial structures in the Americas, or what values we can draw from it, but I find it nevertheless interesting and worthy of consideration.
I think that some commentators would suggest that that cultural difference between Anglo and Iberian-French colonial structures might be related to the supposed primacy of the absolute nuclear family in Anglo society (as in the example of Franz Ferdinand’s happiest foreign visit being to London where his morganatic wife was accorded a status matching his own). There are claims that quirk is shared by the Dutch and Danes, but not more widely. It would be easier to test the hypothesis if New York were still New Amsterdam.
Late to the discussion, so I’ll just add a few notes (mostly footnotes to what Papito said):
I’ve heard “Latinx” pronounced. It rhymes with “a Kleenex”. Not a very pretty word in English, and it completely violates the phonotactics of Spanish. (I’ve heard that in Argentina some people have started using -e as a neuter ending (so “Latine”; that at least has the virtue of being pronounceable in Spanish.)
In the past, when I said my wife was Spanish, people would often assume that she was Mexican or Puerto Rican. So I learned to say that she’s “from Spain.”
The US Census Bureau defines Hispanic or Latino as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” So Spaniards are in; Brazilians and Haitians are out. But I’ve always thought of “Latino”. Wikipedia, on the other hand, says “Hispanic includes people with ancestry from Spain and Latin American Spanish-speaking countries, while Latino includes people from Latin American countries that were formerly colonized by Spain and Portugal.” So by those criteria, Spaniards are Hispanic but not Latino, Brazilians are Latino but not Hispanic, Paraguayans are both, and Haitians are neither.
This has always bugged my wife, who is never entirely sure what to call herself (or why she should). She’s said that she considers herself Latin, a term which encompasses Italians, French, Romanians, and anyone else who speaks a Romance language; she feels closer to them culturally than to Latin Americans. I’ve tried to explain that there are good historical and sociological reasons for treating Hispanics/Latinos as a group in the US, even if it doesn’t make much sense outside of that context, but still, she has a point. (When we first met in Spain, I knew a lot more about Mexican food than she did.)
Neither my wife nor our kids “look Spanish” (nor do I), at least in the US, and other Spanish speakers are often surprised to hear us speaking Spanish in public. Our daughter was very blond when she was little, and her last name is very Scottish, and so the teachers in her bilingual school were sometimes astonished when she told them that she spoke Spanish. (In Spain, she’s not terribly remarkable. I stand out a bit, but more for my clothes than my looks.)
The Spaniards who ran the empire often didn’t want the natives to learn to speak (much less read) Spanish, because that was the language of power. But the natives often preferred Spanish to native tongues as a lingua franca, because they didn’t want to use the language of rival tribes. Still, even today there are many people in countries where Spanish is the prestige language who speak Spanish as a second language, or not at all. (And the same holds true for Portuguese in Brazil.)
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