The woke left’s insistence on the use of “Latinx” to describe members of the Latino community so as to be more “inclusive” of transgender persons and others who don’t identify as either gender has effectively died a miserable death, as Legal Insurrection previously reported.
The term, as we’ve also noted, has consistently failed to take root within the Hispanic/Latino community, with polls over the years confirming that only small a minority prefer “Latinx,” and others showing overwhelming majorities using “Hispanic” or “Latino/Latina” to describe their ethnic background.
So with the mainstream press and Democrats on up to President Joe Biden seeming to move away from the term, you’d think (hope!) the debate was settled.
But nope, the Usual Suspects are still at it, with the push for “Latine” gaining steam after the spectacular failure of “Latinx”:
For the record, it’s not a new term, with some college campuses having already unofficially adopted it as part of their “inclusive” lingo, and some left-wing “news” sites having proposed it as an alternative, as we’ve documented before:
But because the activist left/media industrial complex doesn’t know how to cope with losing an argument, they’ve launched a renewed and broader push to expand its usage beyond leftist drum circles:
“Latine,” a gender-neutral way to describe or refer to people with Latino origins, is surging in popularity on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media.The big picture: Catch-all terms like Hispanic or Latino have come under scrutiny for blurring important nuances and presenting a large part of the U.S. population as a monolith.
Latine is “part of a movement centered on wanting to build and foster an inclusive community,” says Carlos Zavala, vice president at consulting firm Whiteboard Advisors, which has used the term in reports from its work with tech and education groups.
41% of U.S. Latinos in the latest Axios-Ipsos Latino poll in partnership with Noticias Telemundo say they are comfortable with Latine. […]
To better accommodate diverse gender identities, some Spanish and Portuguese speakers are increasingly using the -e suffix for some nouns, such as using “todes” in addition to “todos,” both of which mean “everyone.”
And yet buried within the Axios report was this little nugget:
Latino/a and Hispanic are still the preferred terms for respondents, with over 80% acceptance, followed by a descriptor tied to a country of origin (such as Cuban American or Mexican American), the poll shows.
Will the “Latine” campaign work? My money is on “no” and I’m not alone:
I think it’s safe to say that if something is allegedly popular “on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media,” then sane people should run away from it as fast as they can. Just sayin’.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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