It's a real problem with her, the language stuff; I cringed every time I saw her say "Latinx" during the campaign, which is a term Latinos overwhelmingly reject, and was originally intended to refer to LGBT Latinos. Obama landed some glancing hits on her presentation style in his most recent book, too.
I've been really curious about where the "Latinx" actually originates from -- I'd suspected in academia, and indeed the first usage seems to have been in a paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx#Origins
Why does it seem cringey? Is it cringey when Fauci uses it? He uses it every time he's referring to Latinos. This Vice video, where Dee asks people on the street about the term, gives the impression that Latino (or, ahem, Latinx :)) folks are mostly fine with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zx4m2ok6D0
Here's Pew, which I trust more than a Vice person-on-the-street interview: just 1/4 of Latinos have even head of the term, and only 3% use it. They're mostly just wondering what the hell Very Online People are on about.
Again: zero objection to people using the term "Latinx" for themselves! If you tell me you identify "Latinx", that's the term I'll use for you. I understand that it's a serious and important term, for instance, for LGBT people. But that just makes Warren's use of it all the goofier. When she talks about helping Latinx people, are we meant to infer that she's specifically talking about LGBT people of Latin descent?
Latino/Latina are from Spanish. The words are gendered because it’s a gendered language. When non-Spanish speakers change it to Latinx it comes across as them declaring Spanish as problematic and “fixing” someone else’s language for them. There is also a class/education issue. It’s a term originating in academia that non-college educated people have mostly never heard of. Being called by a label that you don’t recognize is alienating. Languages are extremely sensitive things. People go to war over them. It’s one thing for academics to mess around with words, but politicians should be very careful about doings so.
More generally, Elizabeth Warren leans too much on intersectional rhetoric and it’s alienating at least to me and I suspect others. I’m a “brown person” but I don’t see America as a country where “white” people are in perpetual conflict with “black and brown” people. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.
> In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.
Going full critical race theory like Warren has, and talking about how we must fix the water infrastructure maintenance deficit because of how it affects “black and brown” people is otherizing. You’re putting me in a bucket and now I’m thinking about that instead of water infrastructure.
It would be easy for Democrats if all non-whites had a strong pattern of voting out of racial solidarity. And this premise filters into their rhetoric. But I’m not going to vote Democrat out of racial solidarity and frankly I deeply resent the implication.
It’s also alienating in a similar sense to “latinx.” A lot of the progressive rhetoric over the last four years centered this idea of a rainbow coalition of “black and brown” and LGBT people. What does that coalition have in common? If you look at countries run by “black and brown people” homosexuality is often illegal. Even among American Muslims, which tend to support same-sec marriage as a legal matter, it is strongly taboo. Almost no US mosques will perform a same-sex marriage and few American Muslims openly self-identify as LGBT: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres.... Most Bangladeshis I know are Democrats and have reconciled themselves to the platform, but would be very upset if their son came out as gay.
The only thing that coalition actually has in common, other than universal American principles, is a common enemy. That doesn’t make for great politics, so part of the whole progressive project is putting for example an LGBT-friendly face on Islam. Folks like Ilhan Omar are not representative of Muslims in America. American Muslims are socially conservative—traditional notions of family part of their identity. They voted for George W. Bush. But progressives have made Ilhan Omar the face of Muslims in America. (Even my dad, who is a moderately liberal Democrat, mentioned this as something that annoyed him without prompting.) And all that just feels like white progressives hijacking people’s identity for political purposes.
Now, it’s fair game to solicit the vote of identity groups based on issues. George W. Bush’s pitch to Muslims was “you’re socially conservative and religious and so am I.” That’s appealing on a specific issue and leaves open the independence of the groups.
Don't entirely agree with what some of what you've said but upvoting you nevertheless as clearly you argue in good faith (and to get you out of negative score), that aside -- you say:
> It’s a term originating in academia that non-college educated people have mostly never heard of. Being called by a label that you don’t recognize is alienating.
Okay, so the word is an academic construct. But it comes from a good place: an effort to be more inclusive. I will understand if everyday folks don't subscribe to the latest code and vocabulary of a younger progressive society, and I understand any resistance to new vocabulary, but that is no reason to stop progress. You can't deny that embedded in our language are the biases of our history, and it's possible that a natural evolution of language may not get us out of this, so why not let a prescriptivist push get us out, even if it comes from academia?
Separately, curious to hear your thoughts on changes imposed by Académie Française in recent years toward a similar direction of being more inclusive.
Let me address the issue from a slightly different angle. White progressives calling Latinos “Latinx” is in some respects a demand for assimilation into prevailing American ideas of gender-identity inclusivity. (I recognize that it’s not an exclusively American phenomenon, but the movement has more purchase in the United States than in say Guatemala.)
There is a long tradition of Americans saying “it’s fine if you’re Catholic or Polish so long as you believe the same things that Protestant Americans believe.” This continues to this day. Whites set the direction of the Democratic Party on social issues, and Black/Hispanic/Muslim people, who are much more conservative on social issues, follow. (Obviously there are many Black/Hispanic/Muslim people who are socially progressive. But on average they’re much more conservative: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo.... For example, 55% of Black Democrats say “you must believe in God to be moral.” Just 11% of white Democrats say that.)
I’m not criticizing all that, I’m just noting that it’s a power dynamic that clearly exists. However, these days, nobody wants to come out and say “it’s okay if you’re a Muslim immigrant from a country where homosexuality is illegal, but you’re in America now and you’re going to have to get cool with LGBT rights.” What happens instead is social engineering of people’s’ identities by media, academia, and political leaders. Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour are amplified and become the face of Islam. Movies and TV are filled with socially progressive hijabis. Progressive Muslim academics and writers are amplified and given platforms.
To use another example: fully half of Black people still do not accept same-sex marriage. Just half say abortion is morally acceptable. When was the last time a socially conservative Black person got any mainstream media airtime? Same thing with Hispanic people opposed to abortion? A Muslim who holds social views held by nearly all of the world’s billion Muslims?
I’m not objecting to the sentiment. I agree Bangladeshis who come to America should leave Bangladeshi views of homosexuality in the old country. What’s creepy to me is the mechanics of how this works. Instead of telling people, “you’re in America now and here’s what we believe” we are redefining peoples’ identities. We selectively amplify Bangladeshi voices that happen to agree with white progressives.
Inclusivity isn’t a single axis. When a politician calls a group of people by a label that’s unfamiliar to them and that they don’t recognize or identify with, that’s exclusionary and alienating.
Example: I’m from Bangladesh. It means “country of Bengalis.” We fought an independence war with Pakistan to have a country for our own ethnic/linguistic group. The name of the country is exclusionary of the non-Bengali ethnic and linguistic groups, including the indigenous population. If an academic wants to come up with a different label for us, they can do that. But politicians shouldn’t use it until we broadly accept the label. It’s not Elizabeth Warren’s place to take a prescriptive position on what Bangladeshis call themselves.
Stepping back, identity and how it’s defined and what it’s defined by reference to is an explosively complicated issue. Focusing on issues like gender inclusivity is a western, and particularly American, way of looking at language and identity labels. Different cultures will sort out how they want to approach these issues. It’s not something white Americans like Elizabeth Warren should just parachute into.
> Académie Française
The French can do what they want with their own language. But as an Anglophile I have to point out that they could easily solve the problem of gendering in French by just speaking English instead. That would also solve their problem of having to come up with French words for things invented by English-speakers.
Rayiner is making an argument about whether politicians should use the word. He argued no and I think that's right.
You're trying to pull him into a separate argument which is should individuals use latinx or latino. (The obvious answer here is to use whatever word who you're talking to would prefer)
All this huff and puff just for someone using a gender neutral term? I can't understand why people get upset by something so unimportant. Or to get upset for not using it for that matter.
And what do you think is the “gender neutral” term that Spanish speakers use when they refer to group of people of Latin American origin? It surely is not “latinxs”.
“What would be point of that?”, yes, that’s exactly the issue. It would seem weird, forced and foreign, just like “latinxs” does to people it is purported to refer to.
It seems to be a bit strange to complain about how widespread the use is of a newly coined term.
I assume that much of this "outrage" is some kind of a "culture war" thing. Instead of focusing on important stuff people get all distracted with "old man angry at minor change" and bike shed things like this ad infinitum.
> yes, that’s exactly the issue
What? it's not needed with "Americans" so there's no need. In some languages gender neutral terms can be legitimately used as a shortcut for using both after each other or similar.
> What? it's not needed with "Americans" so there's no need
But that’s the point: it’s not needed in Spanish either. Spanish speakers are totally fine without new inventions like “latinx”. They see those strange American people, who usually don’t even speak Spanish, try to impose their own new norms on what the Latinos should be called, and they don’t like this kind of cultural imperialism.
The whole problem stems to a large degree from lack of understanding the English speakers have for gendered languages. English is, with few exceptions, not gendered. The exceptions are rare enough that people who care can try to lobby for using gender neutral terms, like they are used for almost everything else. This is often against established language patterns, but since English is, in general, not gendered, it doesn’t seem all that out of place.
That’s not how gendered languages works. In gendered languages, everything had a gender. In Spanish, chair is female, and desk is male. When you use an adjective, you need to use it in an appropriate gendered form to match the gender of the noun. Spanish speakers are completely used to it, and don’t see this as anything special or in need of rectification: that’s just how their language works. External efforts to make some specific words gender neutral are just strange and foreign to them.
You seem to be mixing gendered nouns with something that's actually referring to actual people. Two different things.
In German for example every job ad title need to be suffixed with (m/w). It would be handy if it was gender neutral. I don't understand how the grammatical gender of a random noun e.g. wine, that happens to be masculine in German, is comparable to something that's referring to actual persons.
In Swedish for example there are the pronouns "han" (he) and "hon" (she), and now there's a gender neutral "hen". The latter being very handy when you don't know the gender of the person that's being talked about. But of course this addition has made culture warring people (a.k.a right-wing folks) very upset in Sweden too.
> You seem to be mixing gendered nouns with something that's actually referring to actual people. Two different things.
No, because when you refer to actual people, you still need to use a gendered noun. The issue is which gendered nouns to use, and different language have different rules about it.
In German, for example, one just like in Spanish needs to match the gender of the adjective to the gender of the noun. However, unlike in Spanish, German doesn't really have gender distinction in plural, and you generally use the same form to refer to group of people regardless of whether it comprises of only males, only females, or whether it's mixed.
Spanish, however, has gendered plural, and it also has a rule that whenever one refers to a group of people, one uses female gender noun only if the group comprises of only females. Whenever the group is fully male or mixed, one uses masculine form of the noun. So, a group of Latino men is "latinos", a group of Latino women is "latinas", but the mixed group of Latino men and women is actually "latinos" again. To add to that, the masculine plural version of the word "latinoamericano" is "latinoamericani", but the feminine version is "latinoamericanas", and not "latinaamericanas" (this is a compound word, and not an adjective-noun pair, hence the "latino" doesn't get declensed to "latina")
In short, any time you refer to group of Latin Americans in Spanish that doesn't happen to be all female, you'll always be saying "latino", and never "latina". Hence, the word "latinx" is solving a nonexistent problem, same as the word "Americanxs" would in English.
Why did you skip the Swedish example? That's the most similar to this. It's just a shortcut.
This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter. They are under no obligation to continue to follow the the original language's grammar. We would have a major linguistical crises on our hands if that was so.
Because I don't know anything about Swedish language :)
> This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter.
Which is silly, because "Latinos" is already gender neutral in its actual use, both in Spanish and in English. It declenses in Spanish using masculine form, but as the above example of chair and desk, grammatical gender of a noun doesn't have to say anything about gender of whatever it refers to. It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female: this is the gender neutral form.
> They are under no obligation to keep following the the original language's grammar.
Sure, there is no obligation. They could also decide to just call all groups of people from Latin America "Latinas", or just do away with that stem altogether, and just use "Hispanic" instead. Of course, in the former case, the Spanish speakers would be very confused that Americans keep insisting on only referring to females, and in the latter, the Brazilians might get confused why they are now called Hispanic. But, they'd be wrong to have any concerns about this, because languages are completely arbitrary, and Americans are under no obligation to have their language make any sense or be consistent with anything else.
The above is, of course, absurd, just like the word "Latinxs". Just use the word Latinos, which is already gender neutral, if you happen to care about it.
> It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female:
It doesn't even say that; it only means that the groups is not known to be all-female, as the masculine grammatical gender is used for indeterminate as well as mixed human gender.
> The above is, of course, absurd, just like the word "Latinxs". Just use the word Latinos, which is already gender neutral, if you happen to care about it.
Or, since Latinx is an adjective (not a noun), use “Latin” which American English, at least, already did before adopting the Spanish Latino/Latina. If we're dropping it for a non-Spanish gender-neutral English adjective with the same meaning, why not revert to the one we were using before that was only dropped to respect the language of the described population?
> It does in the case of the word "latinos", but it only says that the group is not all-female: this is the gender neutral form.
And that requires information about a groups composition ahead of time doesn't it?
Anyway, I think it's important to remember that this is English speaking folks that are trying to be more inclusive and finding "Latinos" to refer primarily to a group of males. They may even disagree with the original preference of Spanish to go with Latinos over Latinas for a mixed composition.
> And that requires information about a groups composition ahead of time doesn't it?
No, because when you know nothing about composition of the group, you use the gender neutral form (masculine) instead of feminine one.
> English speaking folks that are trying to be more inclusive and finding "Latinos" to refer primarily to a group of males.
When American use the word “people”, it primarily refers to groups of Americans. Should they be more inclusive and invent a term, say, maybe peoplxs, that includes also non-Americans? That’s absurd, of course.
> When American use the word “people”, it primarily refers to groups of Americans. Should they be more inclusive and invent a term, say, maybe peoplxs, that includes also non-Americans? That’s absurd, of course.
> This is English speaking folks that have adopted a Spanish word and are now making it gender neutral by skipping the last letter. They are under no obligation to continue to follow the the original language's grammar.
Don’t you see how that makes it worse? The English word-Latin—is already gender neutral! Americans adopted “Latino” as gesture to the large number of Spanish speakers living in America. It’s not just a borrowed word Americans happen to use, it’s a word used to refer to a large Spanish-speaking minority group living in the country.
But "Latin" is ambiguous and normally not used to describe people of Latin-American decent, at least not in Europe, and the emphasis in America seem to be towards Spanish speaking countries rather than the Latin/Romance languages as a whole.
This isn’t about using a gender neutral pronoun with respect to a specific person. It’s about English-speaking people trying to change the label used for an entire group of mostly immigrant people by slicing and dicing a Spanish word and adding an English ending to it.
