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I am spanish. I fully agree this is all deeply stupid political-industry stuff that just generates artificial conflicts. Like many other things in politics.
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"The American Cancer Society advises that Latinx, along with the equally gender-neutral Latine, Latin@, and Latinu, “may or may not be fully embraced by older generations and may need additional explanation.” Cool cool, I look forward as a white guy to explaining to a group of Spanish people why they are wrong and are really LatinX and I'm doing it for their protection. Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn…
> Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn both English and then a made up filter created by well paid academics on top of it. Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”. Latinu and Latin@ I’m less sure about, but wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same. While th…
This is disputed, both sides have evidence for them and no one really knows.
I'm fluent in Spanish and have a hard time seeing a native Spanish speaker inventing LatinX. There's no good Spanish way to pronounce it, and inserting the English pronunciation of the letter 'x' is an odd choice for someone who's paying attention to identity politics—you would think they'd try to find an alternative that feels less anglo.
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Our language doesn't need fixing, that's just the way it is. This whole latinx is literal cultural imperialism. It's not about not understanding the meaning of using these terms, it's the fact that it suggests that our entire language should be changed to be more "inclusive".
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Americans can continue to use latinx, fine, but don't impose that onto natives because that just doesn't make sense in their native language. And saying, "we need to educate the older generation" is arrogant and disrespectful, we understand it quite well.
The use of Sierra Club as the lead example is a good one because of the racialist motivations in the founding of the club. The change of usage to “enslaved people” is an important one because of the lack of agency in being enslaved (!). It’s easy for the brain to make the connection that a term like “slave” is an inherent property of the person so described, like “brown-haired” rather than something imposed upon them…
It seems to me that enslaved people have much bigger problems than to worry about this, and if they don’t anymore, then the wording doesn’t matter. They are either ”former slaves”, which emphasizes the severity of the situation they were put through, or they are still slaves, which again——emphasis. I could argue that the new wording diminishes the seriousness of the predicament (but I won’t as I don’t believe that, given the horrors of slavery, the word matters at all here).
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> Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn both English and then a made up filter created by well paid academics on top of it. Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”. Latinu and Latin@ I’m less sure about, but wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same. While th…
> Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”. This is disputed, both sides have evidence for them and no one really knows. I'm fluent in Spanish and have a hard time seeing a native Spanish speaker inventing LatinX. There's no good Spanish way to pronounce it, and inserti…
There's no good English wsy to pronounce it either. Its a deliberate linguistic transgression. (Aesthetically, its why I personally like Latine better for the specific purpose of explicit inclusion of non-binary identities, but, being neither Latin nor non-binary, I don't weight my aesthetic preferences heavily on the issue.)
EDIT: Really, the problem of how to identify a group in a way inclusive of a subgroup to whose existence the broader group is at best, as s whole, ambivalent is the real issue, and the origin stories, and more to the point the attempt to impute malign motives based on particular origin stories, is a way to avoid reaching the issue.
"The American Cancer Society advises that Latinx, along with the equally gender-neutral Latine, Latin@, and Latinu, “may or may not be fully embraced by older generations and may need additional explanation.” Cool cool, I look forward as a white guy to explaining to a group of Spanish people why they are wrong and are really LatinX and I'm doing it for their protection. Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn…
As a Hispanic American, I very regularly tell people I am Latino and that Latinx is incredibly offensive to my heritage. I'm in my 30s and the younger people I know also find it offensive.
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Indeed, and someone with money and a desire to prevent actual class conflict can get a lot of mileage out of encouraging tensions in the narrow, purely expressive sense you describe
That’s the Marxist analysis and there might be something to it, but I think the main driver is just human nature. People like to feel superior. In one era that was “I’m a devout Christian from a good family unlike those other whores and sodomites,” in another it was “I’m a hard working industrialist unlike those lazy, old money playboys,” and now it’s “I’m a social worker dealing with the problems of BIPOC folx, unli…
All I'm saying is in an attention economy, one does well to reflect and ask who benefits from one's beliefs and their mode of expression. Substitute money for power, reputation, or any scarce social resource, and I think the analysis still tends to work, whether or not it echoes Marx.
The semantic turn of the Left is one of the worst signs of intellectual decay. There's approximately zero evidence that linguistic changes influence thought: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected by linguists except perhaps in some very narrow situations. The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. And none of them are better or worse than the o…
The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real.
Though I wonder if this diagnosis is actually too optimistic, in that it assumes people are 1) aware and care about the real problems and 2) willing to put in effort to enact meaningful change. Perhaps this is too cynical, but I think most people who adopt this sort of symbolic gesturing are pretty detached from the root issues of power and wealth inequality. "Virtue signaling" is a product of vanity, not pessimism/powerlessness.
The use of Sierra Club as the lead example is a good one because of the racialist motivations in the founding of the club. The change of usage to “enslaved people” is an important one because of the lack of agency in being enslaved (!). It’s easy for the brain to make the connection that a term like “slave” is an inherent property of the person so described, like “brown-haired” rather than something imposed upon them…
Nitpick: synecdoche would be if someone called you "America". You can imagine a teasing "Hey America, get out of the way" toward a tourist who encapsulated their views of Americans. "American" is just a regular adjective.
While some of the things referenced are ridiculous, the author is really misinterpreting many of the guides here, to a point where it feels like willful misinterpretation. For instance.
> If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat.
If anything, using the term “structural” helps associate much more context about racism, its causes, and its ugliness, not less.
Also, these guides aren’t targeting literature. They mostly meant for situations where you don’t want to evoke emotion in your writing.