Robert Kuttner Agrees with Me: Don”t Call Latinos or Latinas “Latinx”

I hate, loathe, detest and despise the term “Latinx,”which is now afflicting newspaper pages like a plague as a supposedly gender-neutral term to describe people of Latin-American ancestry. It's an even worse example of political correctness run amok than the term “LGBT,”“LGBTQ”or “LGBTQ+” As I wrote in an unpublished letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times when I first started encountering the barbaric term “Latinx,” “What on earth is a ‘Latinx’? How do you pronounce it? And since when did folks with same-sex attractions or nontraditional gender identities get tagged with those ever-lengthening and increasingly obscure initials? I’m a Gay man who resents being called an ‘LGBTQ+ person.’ These are examples of what George Orwell meant when he said the purpose of political language was to conceal, not express, meaning." So it was nice to read this e-mail from American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner, who not only can’t stand the term “Latinx” but shows that most Latinos and Latinas can’t stand it either — and that use of the term “Latinx”could actually drive Latinos and Latinas away from the Democratic Party and the progressive cause in general.

NOVEMBER 6, 2019

Kuttner on TAP

How to Lose the Latinx Vote. The term Latinx is supposedly needed as a gender-neutral word to describe voters of Latino or Latina origin. For the most part, pressure to use Latinx comes from Anglo radicals and liberals, not from Hispanics.

Now, a reputable pollster has confirmed that most Latinos and Latinas—98 percent, to be precise—don’t like the word.

For starters, Latinx violates the architecture of the Spanish language. Spanish solves the gender problem in its own way—using a to indicate female, and o to signal male. You got a problem with that?

Moreover, Spanish seldom uses the letter x. When it does, the x is sometimes pronounced like the Spanish j, with the sound kh, as in the word xeres, meaning sherry; other times it is pronounced like a soft s, as in the famous floating gardens of Xochimilco.

There is also the problem of how to pronounce Latinx. When it first appeared, some people pronounced it la-tinks'; others pronounced it lateen'-ex, rhyming with Kleenex. Apparently, the preferred pronunciation is latin-ex', rhyming with Malcolm X. But there is no way to pronounce it that is consistent with spoken Spanish, which never ends words with the letter x.

Reports indicate that most Hispanic people experience the imposition of this ultra-PC word as culturally ignorant and insulting. Classic gringo.

In the Los Angeles Times, a Hispanic writer noted that outlets that used Latinx found their pages “flooded with negative reactions, with some calling the term ‘ridiculous,’ ‘stupid’ and ‘offensive.’”

Latinx was formally rejected by the Real Academia Española, the official committee of Spanish linguists that preserves the language’s integrity.

Meanwhile, President Trump, who characterized Mexicans as rapists and criminals, stands to lose the Hispanic vote big-time. Unless of course liberals screw that up with cultural condescension. Candidates, take note!

The great Mexican patriot Benito Juárez said, “El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz”: “Peace is respect for the rights of the other.” Latinx fails that test. ~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Robert Kuttner’s new book is The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy.