Gotta consider this progress for the woke brigades. Last fall, two percent of Hispanics nationally said the gender-neutral term “Latinx” describes them accurately. A poll of Hispanic Democrats in Florida taken this past spring found a cool one percent prefer the term to alternatives. Today Pew announces that three percent of Hispanic Americans are using the term.
If the left keeps pushing, maybe they’ll get to majority acceptance circa 2050.
I wouldn’t bet against them. They seem highly invested in their crusade against “gender norms.” Once they dig in, they don’t quit until they annoy you into submission.
Yair Rosenberg makes an astute point. Are there any other cases where it’s considered politically correct to describe a racial or ethnic group with terminology that the group itself disfavors? Having a cohort of mostly white, well-educated, Very Online twentysomethings insist on describing a minority with its own insular, fashionably woke term seems a bit … insensitive. Although I suppose the response would be that Hispanics are relatively privileged compared to the “non-binary,” who may feel mischaracterized by the gendered terms “Latino” or “Latina.” If you finish in second place in the victim Olympics, you have to pay a price.
Just 23 percent of Hispanics have even heard of the term “Latinx.” Contain your surprise upon discovering that the two demographics most likely to have heard the term are adults aged 18-29 (42 percent) and college grads (38 percent).
Among those who have heard of it, two-thirds say no to adopting it and a mere 14 percent have used it to describe themselves. Within that niche, there’s a further niche: 14 percent of Hispanic women aged 18-29 have used it, but among every other age/gender permutation no more than two percent have.
So why do white progressives continue to try to foist this term on the entire group?
Rosenberg makes another interesting point:
A data point worth remembering: Bernie, who never used “Latinx” on the campaign trail, absolutely swept Latino voters, while candidates like Warren who used it did not. To reach a community, one needs to know and use their own terminology. https://t.co/eQycfwmMUz
— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) August 11, 2020
If you’re Hispanic and listening to politicians chatter at you about the “Latinx” community, do you (a) recognize it as an innocuous rhetorical device aimed at “gender inclusivity,” (b) wonder “what the hell is he/she talking about?”, or (c) take it as a mild slight insofar as you’re clearly not the real target audience for someone who’s making a point of using such an arcane term? Seems like bad politics, if nothing else. But then, we probably err in assuming that wokesters use “Latinx” first and foremost because they want to get Hispanics to use it. They’re not talking primarily to out-groups by using that terminology, they’re talking to each other. It’s shorthand for showing that you’re on the team ideologically.
Exit quotation from Lachlan Markay: “As a big fan of American cultural imperialism, I must say the low-key dismantling of a foreign language to placate a domestic political constituency is quite impressive.”
