https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/word-games-and-fake-diversity-left-bruce-thornton/
Years ago at a block party in my old neighborhood, my next-door neighbor, a Mexican-American named Lawrence, introduced himself to a new resident, a white self-proclaimed activist lawyer. “No, no!” she scolded him. “Lorenzo!”
The chutzpah of a white woman telling a Mexican-American man how to say his own name still epitomizes for me the white elite Left’s obtuseness about their own patronizing arrogance, particularly when it comes to the ethnic “other” they supposedly champion. And it also reveals the way identity politics uses language to encode its reduction of complex, unique individuals into crude political caricatures that they label “diversity.”
I remembered this encounter last week when I read about a poll that found only 2% of Hispanics/Latinos used the clunky neologism “Latinx,” and 40% are offended by it. Invented by mostly white, university educated “woke” activists and race-mongers, the word is a virtue-signaling totem for the Left’s exquisite sensitivity to how language allegedly reinforces sexism in order to further the nefarious designs of the “patriarchy” that, as the cliché goes, wants to keep women, especially women “of color,” “pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen.”
In the case of “Latinx,” the “woke” complaint is that “Latino” is a masculine noun, and so its use to describe people of both sexes is demeaning and exclusive of Latina women. But this pretext assumes that native speakers of Spanish, or any other European gendered dialect of Latin, will hear the word and immediately think of males and notice the exclusion of females.
Similarly, grammatical usage such as defaulting to the masculine when describing mixed-sex groups has been so common for so many centuries that most native speakers won’t even notice a word’s gender, any more than they think about biological males and females when they hear masculine or feminine nouns that have nothing to do with biological sex. It’s doubtful that a Spanish-speaker thinks the word for song, “canción,” which is feminine, has some meaningful connection to women or is exclusive of males.
The politico-linguistic dynamic behind “Latinx” was started by feminism over half a century ago in the case of the English suffix “-man” to describe a non sex specific activity or profession. Until feminist activists started complaining, most speakers of English would hear a word like “chairman,” “spokesman,” or “Congressman,” and would not notice its biological sex implications any more than they would other suffixes like “-ing” or “-ed.” Moreover, the same tenacity of usage, the power of linguistic habit that makes grammatical gender unexceptional, explains why words in English like “human” and “woman,” despite the efforts of feminist language commissars, are still in common use.