Rest in Peace, ‘Latinx’
Really, about the only places you hear/read “Latinx” used anymore on a regular basis are on college campuses and by the Very Online Left.
As we’ve discussed before, and despite the woke left’s best efforts, the term “Latinx” has consistently failed to take root within the Hispanic/Latino community. Polls have routinely shown that only tiny minorities prefer the term “Latinx,” with others showing overwhelming majorities using “Hispanic” or “Latino/Latina” over “Latinx” to describe their ethnic background.
The allegedly “inclusive” term, which is believed to have originated in 2004, is so despised in the Hispanic community that Hispanic lawmakers from both parties in Congress and in states like Arizona and Connecticut have actively sought to have the term banned for use in official government documents.
As early as 2021, the warning signs for Democrats on the use of the term were becoming more prevalent, with polls indicating it was hurting them with the Hispanic/Latino vote:
More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.
At a time when Republicans appear to be making inroads among Latino voters, the survey results raise questions about how effectively the party is communicating with them, according to pollster Fernand Amandi and other Democrats and Latino vote experts.
“The numbers suggest that using Latinx is a violation of the political Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no electoral harm,” said Amandi, whose firm advised Barack Obama’s successful Hispanic outreach nationwide in his two presidential campaigns. “Why are we using a word that is preferred by only 2 percent, but offends as many as 40 percent of those voters we want to win?”
Here we are three years later, and polls are showing Democrats in big trouble with this core voting bloc, many of whom are undoubtedly tired of being taken for granted and sick of being likened to breakfast tacos:
Shockwaves ran through the White House earlier this month when a Siena College/New York Times poll showed President Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among Hispanic voters.
Many analysts complained that Mr. Trump’s 6-point lead in the poll couldn’t be real — but few denied that he had gained ground.
Battered by inflation and worried over crime and chaos at the border, Hispanic voters are running away from Mr. Biden, particularly in key states where they play an outsized role.
[…]
The Biden campaign launched Latinos con Biden-Harris, promising $30 million in advertising targeting the community. The first ad cast the election as a referendum on Mr. Biden’s support for lowering insulin costs and defending abortion rights.
Democrats are quite rapidly losing support among Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters in polls and at least some recent election results.https://t.co/PYcnnM1QN3
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 15, 2024
Accordingly, it would appear that the Biden White House/campaign has also made a strategic decision to get back to using the term “Latinos”:
Trump has no clue what the hell he’s talking about when he attacks Latino and immigrant communities.
We’re the most diverse country in the world—that’s what makes us strong. pic.twitter.com/KtdER3aI3o
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 22, 2024
We are excited to launch Latinos con Biden-Harris.
Latinos are part of the fabric that makes this country great, and the power of the Latino vote will help decide this election. Together we are organizing to win in November.
Text LATINOS to 30330 to join us. pic.twitter.com/EPGu4joOFc
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) March 19, 2024
National media outlets have done a reversal of sorts on the use of “Latinx” as well, as evidenced by this recent Axios report:
The Biden-Harris campaign will announce a national program today to reach Latino voters as they look to reverse gains that Trump appears to be making. https://t.co/7qNcSXVpA3
— Axios (@axios) March 19, 2024
And this one from NBC News:
Latino organizations and national civil rights groups blasted a lawsuit filed by conservative legal activist Edward Blum to end a Smithsonian Institution internship designed to draw more Latinos into museum studies and jobs. https://t.co/RtciXjfKB7
— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 19, 2024
Really, about the only places you hear/read “Latinx” used anymore on a regular basis are on college campuses and by the Very Online Left.
The worst part of the whole LatinX thing was media organizations decided to randomly adopt a term that an overwhelming majority of the Latino community actively rejected because they were sympathetic to the left-wing activists who pretended like it was a thing. https://t.co/HMarB9fqvC
— AG (@AGHamilton29) March 23, 2024
The Very Online Right, meanwhile, has had fun with the apparent demise of the term:
RIP Latinx.
2019-2024 pic.twitter.com/hvhlRlp1a7
— Prison Mitch (@MidnightMitch) March 23, 2024
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
LatinO? Not LatinX? When did this happen? https://t.co/7JaHw3XOqG
— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) March 19, 2024
More Democrats are using vinyl records right now than using the term “Latinx.” In case you were wondering if you were “ on the right side of history.”
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) March 23, 2024
Whenever someone brings up "Latinx" to a Latino. pic.twitter.com/ivXbQfFkiR
— VicHD (@VictorFioriHD) March 18, 2024
Now if only the terms “birthing people” and the like would travel down a similar path to irrelevancy.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Democrats will put a bad idea aside for a while, but give them and LaRaza time and they will bring it back. The Democrat sees himself as never wrong, just not yet right.
Can we bring back “oriental?” The same misfits who proposed Latin X banned this word. Asians overwhelmingly approve of it.
And “Oriental” is a more accurate name, merely meaning “eastern”. “Asian” encompasses the bulk of people in the world – many more than the Orientals people mean when they say “Asian”, here – and “East Asian” just comes right back to “Oriental”, but using “East” instead. Further, the Brits use “Asian” to mean Pakistani or Indian, which Americans never do, so the left loves that there is this extra confusion in the use of the term.
That is the purpose of identity politics-confusion.
The left’s objection to “Oriental” is that it is inherently Eurocentric, whereas “East Asian” is not. For the same reason the left has banned the terms “Near East”, “Middle East”, and “Far East”, replacing them with “Eastern Europe”, “Western Asia”, and “Eastern Asia”.
Though these are all relative terms. Remember that the Orient Express stopped, not in China or even Persia but in Constantinople; that was considered “the Orient”. And in the 1820s, when Fanny Trollope lived in “the Wild West”, she meant Cincinnati.
LOL. I am well aware of what the leftist turds like to claim with their demented minds. It’s pathetic and stupid. The language is English (or some other European language) and in that language those areas are EAST of them. European languages are not centered outside of Europe. This is how normal things work.
But we are talking about leftist turds who think they are being superior when they mangle foreign pronunciations in English (and other Western languages) in order to try and make sounds that don’t actually exist in those languages and are the reason why certain names were created in those languages to begin with. But self-hating Western leftists have to take every opportunity to try and claim that Westerners are such bad, bad people (except for the suicidal leftists who are happy to destroy the West to show how moral they are).
It’s all just pathetic and retarded. But I would have been disappointed if you had not jumped in to try to defend the pathetic retardation.
Having read every published work of Fanny’s son, I can report he used the N-word in preference to negro. And despite propagandizing against antisemitism in a few minor works, he very evidently agreed with the negative stereotypes.
A famous Joseph Conrad novella also comes to mind.
Every published work?! Wow, that is a lot.
Every work, and all read in one happy year.
I assure you, the
East AsiansOrientals have no problem calling Europeans “Westerners”!China calls itself “the Middle Kingdom” because it views itself as the center between heaven and earth.
Sounds pretty Asian-centric to me…
In one year?! You must be a very fast reader. If I were to try reading his entire works it would take me several years.
But if you’re that big a fan of his, and you have any taste at all for fantasy, then you absolutely must read Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton.
We used to have a major airline called Northwest Orient. It was a fine airline and I used to fly it often. Then it became Northwest.
I remember their jingle, with the Chinese gong.
And, how about Negro?
I am being dead serious when I ask this: what was wrong with “Negro”?
When did it become racist, aside from when puppet-masters like Jesse Jackson pulled the strings and made gutless white people dance to his demands for the change?
The United Negro College Fund went the way of Kentucky Fried Chicken 16 years ago. It still retains the full name, but brands itself the UNCF. The initial that dare not speak its name.
Yet the NAACP perists.
And then there’s NWA – as mainstream popular as you could get – with its ex-members being among the most famous people in society, today.
Well, Hollywood opened the door to using Negro again when the atrocious “American Society of Magical Negroes” was released.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisboltssr/p/the-american-society-of-magical-negroes?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3ignek
Yes, I’m plugging my own article. Need to get subscribers!!
What’s really a hoot is being called upon to describe someone in a business setting. In my corporate world I have been asked a few times to identify some passing consultant or employee whose name I didn’t know. Am I to stutter something about a continent of origin or a person of color? Am I to describe a necktie? To hesitate is to fall into a toil. I look my questioner straight in the eyes and firmly state that he is a black guy around thirty. I always receive an incredible, shocked look when I do this, followed by utter confusion. No doubt after having collected himself, the questioner eventually realizes there is no infraction he can report, and probably counts himself lucky he wasn’t the one called upon to provide a description.
“Hey, I capitalized the B.”
I don’t think “Negro” ever became “racist”, just old-fashioned. Using it marked you as someone from an older generation, not “with it”, from a generation in which “black” was considered offensive so people had to use polite terms like “negro” or “colored”, while modern up-to-date people are not afraid to say “black”. Or something like that.
Think of how “Jew” used to be considered offensive, so polite people used terms like “Jewish person”. Then in the ’60s, at about the time it became OK and modern to say “black”, it also became OK to say “Jew”, and now nobody blinks an eye at it and “Jewish person” has become old-fashioned and quaint.
You might think that. Go call a black a Negro and see how it goes. Better hope most of them are like me, who don’t care if you call me a Negro.
I still use Negro and Orient(al) in my writings for they are perfectly good words.
Congoid is good too.
Nah, they think oriental is a term for furniture
LatinX was always a laugh riot. If the left were truly bothered with gendering in Spanish then they would have to change the whole friggin language, not just one word. Spanish is a gendered language. ABout the only language that is almost completely ungendered is … ENGLISH!
The left should just stick with DOCTOR Jill Biden’s name for Latinos – “breakfast tacos”.
Someone should remind Joe that when Trump criticizes (illegal) immigrants (aka “aliens”), a considerable portion of them are not Hispanic.
Tell that to JR. To him, any reference to poor people is an immediate reference to blacks, and any comments about aliens is immediately conflated to mean brown people. Because racisssss
Was it because I kept saying “la tinks?” I dearly hope so.
That said, will we still have to capitalize “black” but not “white?” (White supremacism, don’t ya know).
I admire the Latinos for not allowing the left to mutilate their language the way they have English (and prepubescent children).
I also pronounce it “latinks”, like “lynx”. It’s the only reasonable way to pronounce it. And it sounds as ridiculous as it is.
But I understand the idea of capitalizing “Black” but not “White”. I refuse to capitalize either one, but I understand the point they’re making, and it’s a valid one as far as it goes. Their idea is that “Black” is a genuine identity, meaning Black American. Not everyone with black skin is Black; Africans are not Black, and possibly West Indians aren’t either. Whereas the only people who identify as White are in fact white supremacists; other white people identify as wherever part of Europe their people came from, or just as “American”, if their people have been here so long that such geographic history has become vague or forgotten.
As I said, I understand this point, but I refuse to cooperate. When I say someone is black or white or any other color I am not talking about their “identity” but giving a physical description, just as when I say they’re tall or short or whatever. Identity has its time and place, but is not the overwhelming or even only relevant factor that the left has turned it into. For the most part I don’t care how someone else identifies. It’s not relevant to me, so I don’t bother mentioning it unless it comes up.
Well, Milhouse, if you are pronouncing “Latinx” in Spanish, it comes out as a mess of a word. “Lateenks” is a “Spanglish” pronunciation. An “x” in Spanish generally has a “h” pronunciation, for example, “Mexico” is not really pronounced “Mek-sik-oh”, but “Meh-hee-koh”. “Texas” is really “Tay-hass”, and so forth. “Latinx” would be something like “Lah-teen-eh”, not “Lah-teen-ah” as in “Latina” (which would be sex-specific for female, or “Lah-teen-oh” for Latino, which is sex-specific for a male. The vast majority of Romance languages are not built for neutral nouns. They just don’t exist in Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese. As far as Romanian (which is a Romance language), I would not know.
Why would I try to pronounce it in Spanish, when it’s not a Spanish word? It’s an English word, so I pronounce it in English, in which it sounds ridiculous but can be done, just like “lynx”.
I can just imagine pronouncing it with a guttural “ch” sound, as in “loch”; that would sound even more ridiculous.
Wouldn’t it have been a hoot if the left’s initiative had launched “tinks” as a new pejorative nickname, in the vein of “spics,” “wops,” and “kikes.”
I refer to myself as “Cracker”, as have many people. I grew up as the middle of three boys and we were Cookie, Cracker and Crumb.
I love the looks on eyes when an old friend calls me Cracker.
Democrats will simply come up with something else that reveals their fakery and true lack of care for the people they pretend to cry for.
I have so many stupid words I’d like to see retired including : BIPOC, intersectional, systemic oppression, cisgender, dead name, heteronormativity, nonbinary, pinkwashing, slut shame, toxic masculinity, green wash, LGBTQIA2S+, body positivity, cis, cultural appropriation, internalized misogyny, trigger warning, reading list, mansplain, BLM, and problematic, to name a few.
The deadname cudgel is fun. I legally changed my name about 10 years ago. Occasionally a medical office will dredge up old records for me and begin calling me by my old name. When I correct them, they actually push back, for some reason. Then I look them in the eye and ask them if it is their office policy to deadname people. The look of immediate terror in their eyes, you would think I had pulled a gun on them. Hilarious, coming from a septuagenarian white deplorable.
How does “reading list” belong on that list? Do leftists use it to mean something other than its ordinary meaning?
Reading list is a term used to say that you need to read more because you are ignorant of the woke ways, like reading such important works as White Fragility etc., and decolonize your reading library (yup …that’s another term I’d like to never hear again).
Words:
“The word is not the thing; the map is not territory.”
But this is precisely the crux of where Democrats disagree with everyone else. If the territory is ugly, fix it by making the map pretty. If the territory is full of literal crap, like SF, then draw the crap prettily on a pretty map.
Yes, and that is almost the left’s chief fallacy. They think if you can get everyone to agree that X is bad, and then you start labeling Y as a species of X, then that will make Y bad too. But it doesn’t work like that, because as Shakespeare pointed out it’s not being called a rose that makes something smell sweet; it’s smelling sweet that makes us call it a rose. If we start calling bad-smelling things roses that won’t make them smell any better, it will just make us stop thinking that roses smell sweet in the first place.
Not only do a large majority of Hispanic/Latinos reject the “Latinx” label, a significant percentage self-identify as “white”. They also reject the arrogant, racist, and condescending narrative of the left that they are naturally confined to some fictional “Latino community”.
I’ll feel comfortable that this term has finally been retired when it has been abandoned by HR departments. So far that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Maybe next year.
I’m so old, I recall when “Chicano” was used as a general reference to Hispanics.
That was, like, back in the heyday of “Chico And The Man.”