Does Anybody Really Want To Be Called Latinx?
More than three-quarters of U.S. Hispanics have never heard the term, and only 3 percent prefer it.
Short answer: No.
Do you know what the term Latinx means? It’s a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina that arose in academia before spreading to trendy celebrities, media pundits, and virtue-signaling politicians. As of now, however, the people to whom that term applies aren’t buying it. 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 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.
The only Latin person I am aware of who uses it regularly is Congresswoman AOC, who wears her Hispanic identity like a shield, because she grew up in an upper-class white neighborhood and went to a top-tier school but needs street cred in her district.
If she really was Latina from the barrio, she wouldn’t use Latinx. That’s her elite education talking.
Pew confirms this meme I saw to be 100% accurate.
Because of this, I fully endorse and encourage Woke white Leftists to continue to use Latinx every chance they get.
Please, continue to alienate the Hispanic community in the US.
In fact, what I really want you to do is go down to Miami, where Hispanics routinely vote Republican and preach to every Cuban over the age of 50 how capitalism has failed them and Cuba wasn’t really socialism, and be sure to call them Latinx while doing it.
Nothing would make me happier than for these Woke Lefties to taste angry old Cuban machete.
And, while they are at it, instruct all of us deplorables that folks of African descent, ought to be called “Blax”
THAT should end well.
Tangent: being a medic of sorts, unsurprisingly, I work with physicians. I have worked with a couple, born in Union of South Africa and naturalized US citizens, of European heritage, and possessed of rich senses of humor, who insisted upon being referred to as “African-American”
That reminds me of an article I saw recently which referred to the early days of identity politics. It quotes some officials at the time (1970s?) complaining bitterly about immigrants from Spain who identified themselves as “hispanic”.
🙂
The United States Census Bureau definition of “Black or African-American” is that the term “refers to a person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.”
Given that all available anthropological, genealogical, paleontological, and all other scientific evidence shows that H. sapiens originated in eastern Africa, specifically in the general area that is currently Kenya and Ghana… Furthermore, paleogenetic evidence shows that the reduced melanin found in those H. sapiens subgroups that settled in northern latitudes was an evolutionary adaptation from their ancestors who had higher melanin levels…
Well, we all have our origins in the Black racial groups of Africa.
I’m an African-American. Simple science.
It is becoming obvious that the majority of modern problems are being caused by “Woke white leftists”…..They are the driving force behind “NewSpeak” and the current spate of violence in our streets….We outnumber them 3 to 1….
As an aside, how’s that supposed to be pronounced? They keep coming up with these unpronounceable words to shove down everyone’s throats. Xi? Xir? WTF?
Is it “la-teen-ex” or “la-tinks”?
Xi and Xir, at least, follow English language pronunciation rules. It is very rare, but there are English words that begin with an “x” and thus there is a standard (if little used) way to pronounce them. Xi, for example, is pronounced /ksaɪ/… It also happens to be an English word that predates the gender nonsense, a type of subatomic particle if I recall correctly.
Spanish doesn’t use the letter “x” much, at all, and never uses it as the final consonant in a word. It just doesn’t happen. There is no way to properly pronounce it in Spanish.
Mostly I’ve heard “Latin-ex” or “Latin-equis” as in “Dos Equis” beer.
It’s always awkward and wrong.
If I had to pronounce it, I’d make it “la-tinks” so it rhymes with the only Latin word I know that ends in -nx: “quincunx”.