Latino/Latina are from Spanish. The words are gendered because it’s a gendered language. When non-Spanish speakers change it to Latinx it comes across as them declaring Spanish as problematic and “fixing” someone else’s language for them. There is also a class/education issue. It’s a term originating in academia that non-college educated people have mostly never heard of. Being called by a label that you don’t recognize is alienating. Languages are extremely sensitive things. People go to war over them. It’s one thing for academics to mess around with words, but politicians should be very careful about doings so.
Matt Yglesias has a good article on it: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/5/21548677/trump-hispanic-vote-l...
More generally, Elizabeth Warren leans too much on intersectional rhetoric and it’s alienating at least to me and I suspect others. I’m a “brown person” but I don’t see America as a country where “white” people are in perpetual conflict with “black and brown” people. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.
> In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.
Going full critical race theory like Warren has, and talking about how we must fix the water infrastructure maintenance deficit because of how it affects “black and brown” people is otherizing. You’re putting me in a bucket and now I’m thinking about that instead of water infrastructure.
It would be easy for Democrats if all non-whites had a strong pattern of voting out of racial solidarity. And this premise filters into their rhetoric. But I’m not going to vote Democrat out of racial solidarity and frankly I deeply resent the implication.
It’s also alienating in a similar sense to “latinx.” A lot of the progressive rhetoric over the last four years centered this idea of a rainbow coalition of “black and brown” and LGBT people. What does that coalition have in common? If you look at countries run by “black and brown people” homosexuality is often illegal. Even among American Muslims, which tend to support same-sec marriage as a legal matter, it is strongly taboo. Almost no US mosques will perform a same-sex marriage and few American Muslims openly self-identify as LGBT: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres.... Most Bangladeshis I know are Democrats and have reconciled themselves to the platform, but would be very upset if their son came out as gay.
The only thing that coalition actually has in common, other than universal American principles, is a common enemy. That doesn’t make for great politics, so part of the whole progressive project is putting for example an LGBT-friendly face on Islam. Folks like Ilhan Omar are not representative of Muslims in America. American Muslims are socially conservative—traditional notions of family part of their identity. They voted for George W. Bush. But progressives have made Ilhan Omar the face of Muslims in America. (Even my dad, who is a moderately liberal Democrat, mentioned this as something that annoyed him without prompting.) And all that just feels like white progressives hijacking people’s identity for political purposes.
Now, it’s fair game to solicit the vote of identity groups based on issues. George W. Bush’s pitch to Muslims was “you’re socially conservative and religious and so am I.” That’s appealing on a specific issue and leaves open the independence of the groups.