If you use the term ‘Latinx’ and you are not Hispanic, you are being racist. Allow me to explain.
What do you call it when you use a word to refer to a race, ethnicity, or nationality that the people of that race, ethnicity, or nationality have told you not to use? Racism. That’s what you call it.
Hispanic people have told the rest of us not to call them ‘Latinx’. Take them at their word and stop saying it.
Think of it this way. Remember all of those white people who complain that Black people can say the n-word but they can’t? Even more obnoxious, think of the white people who take the position that its OK for them to say the n-word as long as they end it with an ‘a’ instead of an ‘er’? Do you want to be those people? Black people have told you they don’t like the word, so if you don’t want to be racist don’t say it. The same logic applies to ‘Latinx'. Don’t be that person.
One reason Hispanic people have given for not liking the word is that it is a direct affront to Spanish. For one, the letter ‘x’ does not occur frequently in Spanish and when it does, it is not pronounced like an English ‘x’. For instance, the ‘x’ in ‘Mexico’ is pronounced in Spanish, like a hard H is pronounced in English. The same goes for ‘Quixote’.
Come to think of it, the way most people pronounce ‘Latinx’ in English makes no sense. Most people pronounce ‘Latinx’ as “latin-ex.” There is no real precedent for this. ‘Latinx’ has the same structure as ‘Sphinx, ‘lynx', and ‘syrinx’, and so should be pronounced the same way. You never hear anyone say they are going to Egypt to see the Sphin-ex do you? But I digress.
Spanish unlike English puts gender on almost every noun, so that nouns are either masculine or feminine. We are not talking about the more contemporary concept of gender identity here, however. Anyone familiar with Romantic languages knows that nouns get arbitrarily assigned male or female (and sometimes neutral) genders. For instance, ‘tazo’ (‘cup’ in Spanish) is masculine while ‘copa’ (‘drinking glass’ in Spanish) is feminine. Again, it’s arbitrary. It’s not like a coffee mug has a male identity and a wine glass has a female identity. You can’t misgender a coffee mug.1 In Spanish, the general rule is that masculine verbs end in -o and feminine nouns end in -a. There are of course exceptions to the general rule.
The story of the origin of ‘Latinx’ that I’ve heard is that it came from a nightclub in Los Angeles. The club had a night dedicated to Hispanic members of the LGBTQ+ community, and wanted to emphasize that everyone was welcome - men (Latinos), women (Latinas), non-binary, and so on. Thus, the nightclub used the term ‘Latinx’ as a visual pun, playing on the use of ‘x’ as a variable in algebra, to say that all were welcome regardless of gender identity.
At some point, a group of activists ran with the term ‘Latinx’ and tried to make it a thing. Whatever. Languages evolve and ‘Latinx’ might be a real word in a hundred years or so. This is not to say that there is no legitimate concern here. Spanish is not user friendly for addressing non-binary people. You are either a Latino or a Latina. English is not great on this account either as it has only ‘he’ and ‘she’ for people, and ‘it’ is reserved for non-human things. English can resolve this issue, as I have written before, by using ‘they’ as a gender neutral third person pronoun. In Spanish, there is no appropriate non-gendered pronoun. For the third person plural, Spanish has ‘ellos’ (masculine) and ‘ellas’ (feminine) so that we cannot do the same thing we do in English with ‘they’.
This also adds a further wrinkle. In traditional English as late as my time in elementary school, we were taught that if you do not know if a person is a man or a woman (non-binary was not even a consideration back then), then you default to the masculine pronoun. Thus, you would say of an unknown individual “I don’t know if he is a man or a woman.” As forward-thinking people pointed out however, making the masculine the default sends a subtle cultural signal that women are inferior. Thus, today we would say, “I don’t know if they are a man or a woman.” Spanish works like old school traditional English. If you have a mixed group of men and women, you use ‘ellos’. ‘Ellas’ is reserved from groups having only women. Likewise, if you are unsure of the gender or sex of a person, you default to masculine pronouns. Thus, it is difficult de-emphasize the idea of masculine as the default. The proponents of ‘Latinx’ have a point then, that ‘Latinx’ can in its limited context be both inclusive of non-binary people and de-emphasize the masculine when talking about Hispanic people. But this argument proves false.
Consider that the term ‘Hispanic’ already does this and is already widely used in English. In fact, I’ve been using it throughout this entire essay. Consider also that even before a small set of activists tried to make ‘Latinx’ a thing, English just used the word ‘Latin’. Consider that we talk about Latin Jazz, Latin Pop, the Latin Grammy Awards, and of course Latin America. The ‘x’ is not needed in English because the usual move for English speakers is to remove the gender specific ending of the word, converting Spanish ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina’ into English ‘Latin’.
I’ll go a step further. Because of the choices to use ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latin’ in English for a gender neutral term, anyone deliberately using ‘Latinx’ is being intentionally provocative. Consider that Hispanics have told you not to use ‘Latinx’, and if your aim really is to use a gender neutral and inclusive term you have two longstanding choices in ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latin’. Furthermore, ‘Latinx’ is a neologism with almost no uptake outside of the white NPR tote bag set. The use of ‘Latinx’ is thus a deliberate choice to use a word that is disfavored by the group it is used to describe. Plus, you have other more natural options. In other words, if you are using it you are spoiling for the inevitable conflict you will create.
However, let us return to the problem in Spanish. As above, ‘x’ is not a common letter in Spanish, and almost every noun in Spanish has grammatical gender. So, replacing the -o and -a in Spanish with -x is not a viable solution. For instance, ‘Ellos nadan con los chicos’ would become ‘Ellx nadan con lx chicx’.2 That’s not happening. Grammatical gender is so embedded in Spanish that any solution to these issues would be a radical rebuilding of the language from the foundation up. Whereas in English it’s barely an inconvenience. So please don’t be an English supremacist by trying to change Spanish to conform to your expectations.
And building a language intentionally from the ground up never works. Just ask all of those Esperanto speakers.
Back to the issue of racism. The Hispanic3 community in the US has overwhelmingly told the rest of us not to use ‘Latinx’. Not all Hispanics speak Spanish, but Spanish forms a part of their heritage. From the forgoing, that ‘x’ at the end of ‘Latinx’ does not work in Spanish. So when a non-Hispanic white person, like Senator Elizabeth Warren,4 starts saying ‘Latinx’, they are insulting Spanish by Anglofying it (to coin a phrase). And the history of expecting Hispanic people in the US to conform to Anglophone norms is ugly. It’s also tinged with white supremacy (the actual kind, not the wokie kind)5 since Hispanic people have been traditionally viewed by white America as Brown and therefore inferior to whites. Thus, non-Hispanic whites telling Hispanics that they are now Latinx over their objections is the same old racist crap that white America has been dishing out for a long time.
Finally, I anticipate that some of my readers (if I have any) will object that despite everything written above, the term ‘Latinx’ is inclusive of the non-binary community and should be used for that reason alone. My response is “no.” The Hispanic community told us to stop using it because it refers to their ethnicity in a way that they find insulting. That makes ‘Latinx’ racist. Full stop. No argument. Plus you have other options as noted above. Racism is not inclusion, so don’t try to use inclusion to justify racism.
But give it time. Right about now, some nobody professor with an axe to grind at some Podunk college is already contemplating a paper on the evils of misgendering a coffee mug.
Keep in mind that in Spanish the articles change gender with the nouns as well. So that in English we have the indefinite article ‘a’ and the definite article ‘the’. In Spanish we have the masculine indefinite article ‘un’ and the feminine indefinite article ‘una’, and the masculine definite article ‘el’ and the feminine definite article ‘la’. The Spanish articles also change form in the plural into ‘unos’, ‘unas’, ‘los’, and ‘las.’
We should acknowledge that Hispanic as a category is hard to define. It lumps a broad group of people together based on having ancestors that originate in the Americas who spoke Spanish. And even that might not be loose enough. An Indigenous Quechua speaker from Bolivia who doesn’t know a word of Spanish and whose ancestors never knew a word of Spanish would probably still be considered Hispanic by US Americans.
Yeah, yeah. She used to be a Native American or something.
I’ll be discussing the wokie use of ‘white supremacy’ in a future essay.