By Rich Lowry
Tuesday,
December 14, 2021
What the progressive culture elite
wants, it usually gets. Single-sex bathrooms changing overnight to all-gender
or non-gender bathrooms? Done. Illegal immigrants becoming known as
“undocumented persons”? But of course.
So when it was decided in the precincts of
fashionable opinion that the term “Latino” would be retired in favor of
“Latinx,” one could have been forgiven for thinking that this hideous neologism
would, like so much else in American life, go from a fringe cause to mainstream
soon enough.
But a funny thing happened on the way to
the Latinx ascendancy — Latinos have rejected the term, at the same time that a
big swing toward the GOP among these voters has highlighted the perils of
high-handed cultural politics for the Democrats.
“Latinx” may end up being a woke
experiment that failed, showing the vast gap between the
identity-politics-obsessed progressives earnestly talking to one another in
seminar rooms and on social media and the Hispanics in whose name they presume
to speak.
“Latinx” is a project cut from the same
cloth as the endless extension of LGBTQ, which, as of this writing, is now more
properly and comprehensively rendered as LGBTQQIP2SAA.
The alleged problem that “Latinx” was
invented to fix is that is Spanish has gendered nouns. This means that using
the male “Latino” as an adjective to describe men and women of Latin American
ancestry, let alone transgender and nonbinary people, is supposedly
exclusionary, hateful, and downright dangerous. As a handbook on the
terminology by a Princeton scholar explains, “to default to the masculine
gender promotes interpersonal violence against women and nonbinary
individuals.”
“Latinx” rose from the ashes of its
predecessor neologism “Latin@,” an attempted amalgamation of the -o at
the end of the Latino and the -a at the end of “Latina.” But
no one knew how to pronounce the word. It was deemed insufficiently woke because
the -o was supposedly graphically dominating the -a.
(Yes, this is how some people think.) And it caused confusion on social media
where the @ sign is used to tag someone.
Enter “Latinx,” which is only slightly
less ridiculous.
As the Daily Wire’s Giancarlo
Sopo, who has been on a one-man crusade against the rise of the term, points
out, “Latinx” is incomprehensible to any Spanish speaker without some knowledge
of English. Most Spanish speakers don’t think that there’s something
desperately flawed about their language or that Spanish grammar is a proto–hate
crime. The Real Academia Española, Spain’s official institution charged with
maintaining the integrity of the language, has ruled against the -x appendage.
Out in the real world, “Latinx” polls even
more poorly than Joe Biden does. A Politico poll found that
only 2 percent of Hispanics prefer the term, while 68 percent opt for
“Hispanic” and 21 percent favor “Latino” or “Latina.” The term is considered
offensive to 40 percent of respondents, and 30 percent said that they are less
likely to support a politician or group using it.
Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona
Democrat, tweeted in reaction to the poll that he forbids his staff from using
“Latinx” in official communications. “When Latino politicos use the term, it is
largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use,”
he wrote. “It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.”
Still, elite media outlets and other
institutions susceptible to progressive influence, as well as many elected
Democrats, have dutifully defaulted to the term. It’s one thing if an
individual prefers to be called “Latinx” (or the even more cutting-edge
“Latina/o/x” or “Xicanx”). It’s another thing to apply the term to a
large group of people who have no interest in being called a name that makes no
sense to them.
The pushback is a heartening sign of the
limits of elite cultural power, and of the lack of interest of most Latinos in
being pawns in the ever more strained and obscure progressive politics of
perpetual victimology.
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