With 'Latinx,' white progressives try to make Spanish more 'woke' - "When Yale professor Cydney Dupree and her colleague analyzed more than two decades worth of political speeches and conducted experiments searching for bias when communicating with racial minorities, they were surprised by what they discovered. According to their report, published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, conservatives generally addressed whites and minorities similarly, but liberals were likelier to modify their speech and “patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent.”Dupree cautioned that although liberals might be “well-intentioned” and “see themselves as allies,” they could be unwittingly contributing to racial division by dumbing down their language. In light of minorities understandably feeling marginalized, journalists, corporations and politicians would be wise to heed the professor’s warning. Instead, they are ignoring it.One of the most notable examples of corporate America and politicians changing how they speak to ingratiate themselves with minorities is the growing use of “Latinx” as a descriptor for Latinos. What began in the 2000s among activists has now gained currency among marketers, media personalities and progressives. The intentions behind "Latinx" may be benign, but as the son of immigrants who grew up in a community with “English-only” ordinances, I am among the many Americans who consider it an absurd Anglicization of a language that generations struggled to conserve. Progressives argue that Latinx fixes the gendered nature of Spanish, which they maintain is unfair to women and excludes individuals who do not identify as male or female. It is true that nouns are gendered in Spanish, but it is unclear what, if any, problem this poses to Americans.English is not grammatically gendered; “Latinos” is inclusive in both languages, and substitutes like “Latin” and “Hispanic” can adequately describe the population that is Latino and nonbinary. Taken to its logical conclusion, a push for gender-neutral Spanish nouns requires dismantling a language spoken by 572 million people across the world... marketing executives and politicians should understand that many of our families do not want to be called Latinx. The term has some supporters among Latinos, but the fact that the word is controversial makes its usage especially strange, since modern social norms discourage applying loaded terms to minority groups. As deputy editor of Latino Rebels, Hector Luis Alamo described Latinx as “the bulldozing of Spanish.”In a column for the Los Angeles Times, a Hispanic writer noted that millennial media outlets who used it found their pages “flooded with negative reactions, with some calling the term ‘ridiculous,’ ‘stupid’ and ‘offensive.’ ”Alejandrina Gonzalez, a Mexican-American Stanford University student, told me that millennials who view Latinx as liberating have it backwards. “Changing our language is the opposite of empowering,” she said. Not only is Latinx “laughably incomprehensible to any Spanish speaker without some fluency in English,” as two Latino Swarthmore College students argued in 2015, its use has been formally rejected by the Real Academia Española, the official body of linguists that preserves the language’s integrity. Who knew it was progressive to abrogate foreign grammar standards? Rather than making Latinos feel included, progressives are implying the way our families speak is fundamentally inadequate for the United States and progressive American culture. This is offensive to the 85% of Hispanics who, like my parents, speak Spanish to their children and whose most treasured heirlooms are often family traditions and memories in Spanish... Ultimately, what Hispanic Americans who take pride in our heritage see in “Latinx” is progressive preening attempting to solve a nonexistent problem at the expense of a beautiful language that Chicanos and other Latinos endured corporal punishment and bigotry to defend. Liberals should also realize it is impossible to reconcile their professed values — like multiculturalism, education and pronoun autonomy — with the peculiar strain of 2019 progressivism that seeks to radically change our language, disregards linguistic practices, and disavows our right to determine how we are described... The last thing we need are progressives "wokesplaining" how to speak Spanish."
Liberal cultural imperialism!
Does Anybody Really Want To Be Called Latinx? - "A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only 3 percent of U.S. Hispanics use Latinx to identify themselves. A large majority of Hispanics—76 percent of them—have never even heard of the term, which Merriam-Webster included in its 2018 dictionary.This result echoes findings from November 2019 that, despite being, as Reason noted at the time, "a favorite of campus activists and ethnic studies departments," Latinx appealed to only 2 percent of Hispanics nationwide. The irony is that the term Hispanic is inclusive and gender-neutral but, as the Pew study explains, it spurred "resistance" in the 1990s because "it embraced a strong connection with Spain." However, its gender-specific and hence suddenly problematic replacement, Latino, hardly severs all connections with Spain, let alone with European imperialism... While the conversion of Ibero-Americans into Latins resulted from 19th-century French imperialism, the term Latino rejects modern Spain in favor of an odd embrace of the Roman Empire. The French wanted the mostly Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas to be called Latin because of the linguistic origin of the Romance languages. And it was, of course, the Romans, hardly politically correct peaceniks, who conquered the Iberian Peninsula and Gaul (later France) and made them Latin-speaking. Which is to say that using Latin or Latino or even Latinx to distance oneself from European colonialism takes a sense of humor.On the contrary, Hispania, the Latin word for Spain, may have been of autochthonous, Iberian origin, although there is still debate on the matter and several philologists have suggested Phoenician roots. It is intriguing, however, that most people sense the spuriousness of the entire question. As Pew reports, "half of Americans who trace their roots to Spanish-speaking Latin America and Spain have consistently said they have no preference for either Hispanic or Latino as a term to describe the group. And when one term is chosen over another, the term Hispanic has been preferred to Latino." The preference for Latinx by certain woke progressive gatekeepers reflects a commitment to the artificial and top-down over the evolved and organic usage of the people themselves"
Progressive Latino pollster: 98% of Latinos do not identify with “Latinx” label | by ThinkNow | Medium - " Over the past few months and years, several of our clients have noticed the term “Latinx” trending as a new ethnic label to describe Latinos. It has been used by academics, activists, and major companies, including NBC and Marvel, as well as politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren. We were curious about the appeal of “Latinx” among the country’s 52 million people of Latin American ancestry and decided to test its popularity. While my colleagues and I are progressive on social issues, as researchers, we have to put aside our personal biases and render advice based on the best available empirical evidence. To examine the acceptance of “Latinx” our firm conducted a nationwide poll of Latinos using a 508-person sample that is demographically representative of Census figures, yielding a ± 5% margin of error with a 95% confidence interval. We presented our respondents with seven of the most common terms used to describe Latinos and asked them to select the one that best describes them. When it came to “Latinx,” there was near unanimity. Despite its usage by academics and cultural influencers, 98% of Latinos prefer other terms to describe their ethnicity. Only 2% of our respondents said the label accurately describes them, making it the least popular ethnic label among Latinos. Some have speculated that “Latinx” resonates with women and Latino youth. We found no evidence of this in our study... No respondents over 50 selected the term. In other words, 97% of millennial and Gen-Z Latinos prefer to be called something other than “Latinx.” Meanwhile, only 3% of women and 1% of men selected the term as their preferred ethnic identifier... its users tended to be English dominant and US-born. So, what do Latinos want to be called? Consistent with past studies by Gallup and Pew Research, our poll found a plurality of respondents preferred the term Hispanic (44%) over Latino (24%)... its users tended to be English dominant and US-born. So, what do Latinos want to be called? Consistent with past studies by Gallup and Pew Research, our poll found a plurality of respondents preferred the term Hispanic (44%) over Latino (24%)... What is clear from our research is that the appeal of “Latinx” is extremely limited. In fact, it did not register above 3% as a preferred term among any geographic, income, education, or age subgroup we tested."
Liberal logic: groups have the rights to call themselves what they want... unless liberals disagree
Report: Hispanics Weren't Sure Who Dems Were Talking To When They Kept Addressing 'Latinx' People | The Babylon Bee - ""Latinx? What's that?" said one Cuban man in Miami as he saw a Biden bus ad reading, "Hola, Latinx! Biden es Bueno!" "Latinx? Weird. I guess that ad isn't targeted at me," he thought to himself. He then looked down at his smartphone. "Oh, hey, look, a funny video of Trump dancing. Classic!" Analysts are also absolutely flummoxed that Biden playing Despacito on his smartphone did very little to move the Hispanic vote in his direction."
