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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 highlights the perils of high-handed culture politics for the Democrats.
Latinx may end up being a woke experiment that failed, showing the vast gap between the identity-politics-obsessed progressives 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 more properly and comprehensively rendered as LGBTQQIP2SAA.
The alleged problem that Latinx was invented to fix is that 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 the transgendered and non-binary, is supposedly exclusionary, hateful and downright dangerous. As a terminology handbook by a Princeton scholar explains, “to default to the masculine gender promotes interpersonal violence against women and non-binary individuals.”
Latinx rose in 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 @ is used to tag someone.
Enter Latinx, which is only slightly less ridiculous.
As Giancarlo Sopo of The Daily Wire, 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 there is something desperately flawed about their language or that Spanish grammar is a proto-hate crime. The Real Academia Española, charged with maintaining the language’s integrity, 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 Latinx, while 68 percent opt for Hispanic and 21 percent favor Latino or Latina. Forty percent said that they find Latinx offensive and 30 percent that they are less likely to support a politician or group using the term.
Rep. 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 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 something that makes no sense to them.
The pushback is a heartening sign of the limits of elite cultural power and the lack of interest of most Latinos in being pawns in an ever-more strained and obscure progressive politics of perpetual victimology.
Twitter: @RichLowry
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