By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Yesterday, Jill Biden spoke at the LatinX IncluXion Luncheon, and
— actually, wait a moment, what are the rules here, again? The
“LatinX IncluXion Luncheon”? What in the hell is going on with that name?
The stated purpose of the neologism “Latinx” is to remove
the gendered part of the Spanish word “Latino”/“Latina” and replace it with
something more “inclusive.” The obvious purpose of the neologism “IncluXion” is
to match the “x” that results from the degendered “Latino” in the following
word, “inclusion,” even if “inclusion” itself isn’t actually gendered. But
what can explain the event organizers’ failure to match this pattern in the
final ungendered word, “Luncheon”? And why, if the existence of gendered words
is so problematic, didn’t Jill Biden apply the same practice throughout her
keynote speech?
In the passage that garnered the most attention, Biden
said: “Raul [Yzaguirre] helped build this organization with the understanding
that the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx,
as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacos here
in San Antonio, is your strength.” Why wasn’t this amended in accordance
with the conference’s syntactical rules? Surely, Biden meant that “Raul helped
build this organization with the understanding that the diversity of this
community, as distinct as the bodegxs of the Bronx, as beautiful as the
blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacxs here in San
Antonix, is their strength.” It could have been even worse.
Biden is lucky that, by a quirk of historical transliteration, “Bronx” has
already been fixed. Had she chosen, say, San Diego instead, she’d have had her
work cut out for her. (Not that there is anything wrong with that, if one is
differently abled or in possession of a non-capitalist conception of value.)
Fortunately, Biden apologized. Unfortunately, her
contrition was linguistically suspect, too. After she’d suggested that
Hispanics were diverse like breakfast tacos — in a line that a
professional speechwriter actually wrote out, looked at more than once, and
then endorsed as fit for purpose — Biden’s office said she regretted “that her
words conveyed anything but pure admiration and love for the Latino community.”
Well: Wow. We cannot, I hope, be expected to believe that it is
incluxive of the Latinx community for the keynote speaker at the LatinX
IncluXion Luncheon to refer to Latinxs as “Latinos” in her mea culpx?
On the contrary: By the logic of Latinx construction, one must conclude that
Jill Biden was apologizing solely to the male attendees, while
ignoring — spiting, even — the Latina and non-binary
attendees.
Worse yet, Biden’s apology was issued on behalf of the “First Lady” — an archaic and
classist term that not only platforms and normalizes the exclusionary,
transphobic, non-scientific concept of womanhood, but also centers and
reiterates our hierarchical, Western-imperialist preference for ordinal
numbers, and thereby reinforces the idea that some people are lesser than
others. Were she truly committed to the breaking down of barriers, she would
have insisted that any letter within the alphabet that resembles an ordinal
number be removed from both the name of the conference and from her speech.
This would have required replacing “i” and “l,” both of which look too much
like “1”; “s,” which looks too much like “5”; “q,” which looks too much like
“9”; “b,” which looks too much like “6”; and “o,” which looks too much like “0”
— the result of which would have been a speech to the far more incluxive
“XatxnX XncxuXxxn Xunchexn” that included the key line: “Raux helped buxxd thxx
xrganxzatxxn wxth the underxtandxng that the dxverxxty xf thxs cxmmunxty, ax
dxxtxnct ax the xxdegxx xf the Xrxnx, ax xeautxfux ax the xxxxxxmx
xf Mxamx and ax unxxue ax the xreakfaxt tacxx here xn Xan
Antxnxx, xx thexr xtrength.”
Not only would this have been admirably
non-discriminatory — it would have yielded the added advantage of being so
remarkably difficult to read that Biden wouldn’t have got herself into trouble
in the first place.
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