Try as they might to teach the rest of us how to refer to people of Hispanic heritage more inclusively, the enlightened scholars who obsess over pronouns have gotten almost nowhere with efforts to popularize the term ‘Latinx’.
Sixteen years on from when the term first pinged on Google’s radar, even those poor folks who were supposed to be liberated from the misogynistic nature of the Spanish language have scarcely noticed the memo. A poll released Tuesday by Pew Research Center shows that 76 percent of Hispanic-Americans haven't even heard of ‘Latinx’.
Worse yet – and this really has to sting if you’re a gender studies professor at, say, Wellesley College or Yale University – only 3 percent of those surveyed use the term. In other words, even among those US residents of Hispanic descent who are hip to ‘Latinx’, seven out of eight have voted with their vocabularies to reject it.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer and more condescending word, really. ‘Latinx’ might have seemed doomed from the start, given that Spanish is an inherently gendered language, with nouns ending in an ‘a’ or an ‘o’ to signify them as being either feminine or masculine. Teaching the world to replace ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina’ with ‘Latinx’ figured to be a tall order.
Moreover, what would this mean for other languages? The ‘Latinx’ movement seems to imply that all languages with gendered words are inherently sexist.
But stranger things have been accomplished. The same people who worship science managed to overlook the science of biology entirely, and essentially force much of the world to adopt their rules on gender. ‘Misgendering’ someone is now illegal in someplaces.
It’s also banned on Twitter. US Senator Kamala Harris, who on Tuesday was named Joe Biden’s vice presidential running mate, co-sponsored a bill last year that would force public schools to allow biological boys who identify as female to participate in girls’ sports.
‘Latinx’ had a lot of the right backing in academia and media to become a winner. But it hasn’t been fully adopted. The Associated Press Stylebook calls for using it on request – much like giving women the choice of ‘Miss’, ‘Mrs’ or ‘Ms’.
Nevertheless, there remains scant non-elitist support for the term. The Pew poll is no fluke. The liberal research outfit ThinkNow found last year that only two percent of Hispanics prefer to be called ‘Latinx’. Tellingly, three times as many, at six percent, just wanted to be called ‘American’, without any heritage identifier.
Sadly, this won’t be the last we hear from the ‘Latinx’ campaign. When there are virtue-signaling points to be won, no amount of pushback from the little people will discourage a social justice warrior. Like the rest of the cultural revolution going on in the US right now, Latinx is a top-down affair.
Also on rt.com Shelter in places apart and unequal: Topple all the monuments you want, but the real racism’s going unaddressedThe SJWs are patient, too. Having a stranglehold on the ivory towers enables them to program young people over the decades and send them into an unsuspecting world like Trojan horses.
Already, 18- to 29-year-olds in the Pew study were more than twice as likely as the survey group as a whole to use ‘Latinx’. College graduates were using the term at only a five percent clip, but 38 percent were at least aware of the word.
Leftists know how to play the long game. It doesn’t matter whether anyone actually wants their artificial standards of political correctness; they’ll insist that their heroics are vital, even if those perceived as needy don’t see any reason to be liberated. “Give me your poor, your weak, your un-woke...”
If that means taking a word from someone’s language, butchering it and force-feeding it back to them, so be it. ‘Latinx’ is an ill-fitting answer to a question no one asked and a non-solution to a problem that didn’t exist.
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