The Left was shocked by the post-election numbers showing that Latinos in Florida and Texas voted GOP far more than the Democrats had expected. That result stunned them, and led Barack Obama to condemn “Latino Evangelicals.” I believe the result had nothing to do with religion. Then why?
I have to admit that I like a diversity of news and read both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal daily. I get the Left point of view from the Times and the Right point of view from the Journal, and I like to see what the Left and the Right are thinking on a daily basis. In the New York Times, following the Black Lives Matter movement, there was a push to capitalize the word “black,” so that now it is “Black.” Honestly I am okay with that, since if words like Jewish or Italian are capitalized, Black might as well be too. The Left followed the lead set by the Times on this.
When the Latino community saw “Latinx,” they viewed it as cultural imperialism, with these white elitist Harvard-educated hipsters taking away their word.
The Times, and left-wing intellectuals, then went on a political correctness spree about language, and one of the words they set their target on was “Latino.” Latino is a masculine formulated word in Spanish, which the Left felt was unfair to Latino women. So the Times began to use the phrase “Latino/Latina” everywhere they would have just said “Latino” before. This proved too cumbersome for them, so they started to use the word “Latinx,” with the x as a placeholder to represent a or o. Most Left journalists and media and publications followed this trend.
The funny thing is that, when the Latino community saw this, saw Latinx, they viewed it as cultural imperialism, with these white elitist Harvard-educated hipsters in Leftist leadership taking away their word, Latino, and even having the audacity and arrogance to put an x at the end in a way the Spanish language would never envision doing. The word was now unpronounceable. Latinos turned against the liberal political correctness of the Left, big time. Middle class and working class Latinos didn’t understand the Left’s thinking. They viewed Latinx as some sort of racist insult that their Democrat friends were spewing at them.
It’s revealing that shortly after the election, the New York Times stopped using “Latinx.”
This is why Latinos voted for Trump: in rebellion against the arrogant political correctness — actually racism — of the Left, which had affixed itself to Latinos as a target of cultural imperialism.
It’s revealing that shortly after the election, the New York Times stopped using “Latinx.” Today, some of its writers say “Latino,” while some just say “Hispanic” (interestingly, “Hispanic” is the word Donald Trump has mostly used throughout his political career). So we will see, in the next election, whether Latinos vote Democrat or Republican. No one can predict — although I am hoping they will vote Libertarian! Now that they’ve woken up from the leftist nightmare, maybe they will learn the truth about a politics that sees the virtues of liberty.
This is absolutely hilarious. Of course things like this only happen because the fake multiculturalists , who can’t be expected to know anything about other cultures as they know little even about their own, failed to realize that, unlike English, where the genders are mostly used just in regards of the actual males and females, in Spanish and most every other European language every tiny little thing, animate, inanimate and even concepts, has a gender assigned to it and so it simply never occurs to the speakers of those languages to scrutinize much why something has this gender and not the other, as the assigned gender has in most instances more to do with the toss of a coin rather than with any biological nature of anything. They might as well be offended that different days of the week are of different grammatical genders as they are in my native language( where also , by the way, the plurals for many animals have feminine form, while others have masculine – what were our ancestors thinking?)
What I find intriguing though, is how some ideas just seem like they make sense, that nobody even bothers much to question whether they are actually true. And the claim that the language itself is standing in the way for women to get the full recognition and respect they deserve certainly would have to be one of them. But is there anything that could tell us whether tampering with the language would actually help women equality or if it even has anything to do with it before we tear it all apart?
I meet a lot of Filipinos and it is not uncommon for them to refer to people by the wrong pronoun. They will talk about a woman as he and about a man as she or it or might even use all the various pronouns for the same person within one or a few sentences. I have eventually found out that the Filipino languages, at least the Tagalog, the main language, don’t distinguish between the genders at all and so when their speakers learn a new language, it is difficult for them to pay attention to something that doesn’t exist in their own and therefore, naturally, does not seem to be so crucial to them . He, she or it, his or hers – why is that so important when” it” will do? ( But perhaps they are just ahead of us, as we are being pushed in the same direction and it might be just a matter of time before we are forced to abolish the gender classifications and most pronouns too.)
And of course it is not the only language whose speakers never saw the need to bother with the genders (or they lost them and don’t miss them). The most widely used of those gender neutral languages would , of course, be Chinese and as everybody knows ,Chinese have a long tradition of being very concerned with their women’s welfare. Consider, for example, such nice little things, that you may experience as a woman if you go to an off the beaten path, tourist devoid Chinese restaurants. There if you sit down with your extended family, when the waiter comes, he will first take the order from the family patriarch, the grandfather, then the father , then the five year old son, than the grandmother, followed by the mother of the five year old and finally from the 10 year old daughter of the family. In that order. It is so thoughtful of them to give women more time to decide on what they would like to order, don’t you think?
The aristocrats and the rich also sought to it that their wives weren’t overburdened with responsibilities by marrying additional women which, naturally, the existing wives were encouraged to help to pick up, to make sure that they get along swimmingly . In similar spirit, all the wives were, expected to bring along with them two young maids each, that would further help to reduce the amount of night and day “obligations” the wives would otherwise have towards their husband. What else could a man do to show his love for his women?
Not that I understand all the Chinese peculiarities though. I can’t figure out for example in what way the women benefited from public postings, in the halls of apartment buildings of communist China, of the lists of women residents who were currently having a period – regularly updated by other , usually older, women. Nevertheless I am sure that women welfare must had been behind the reasons for it.. And then there is of course the long Chinese tradition, that even this cynic struggles to talk about and so I’ll use the customary Chinese terminology as they know why they use it. I am of course talking about the practice of “bathing of the girls”. And what is meant by ” bathing of the girls” you ask? Well it is what you say when someone asks you: “Wasn’t your wife expecting a child last month?” and you answer: “Yeah, we had a baby girl but we bathed her” – or something to that effect. Think about it. How else are you supposed to say that your unwanted daughter didn’t emerge from the water alive? The one child policy had only put this old tradition on steroids. ( And we are talking about even the wives of aristocrats, not slaves) So we can see that the Chinese go to great lengths, starting with their language, to make sure women feel appreciated.
Of course if we were to pick nominees for the most women friendly language there is, the frontrunner would definitely have to be Turkish. I have read elsewhere that, although also nominally genderless, it nevertheless has some language markers that can be used to identify a woman, if it is not clear from the context or from the name, should it be deemed important (otherwise it might not be clear what the gender of the person discussed is at all and sometimes it isn’t). But what is most important for us here is , that when someone is talking about something that is being done or was done by a group of people and that group includes or included a woman (which is what the gripe is here), then it is imperative that that is clearly identified in the language to make sure everybody knows that a woman was part of it. It is that important. Now wouldn’t American feminists be ecstatic to be so highly valued as women in Turkey are? I mean clearly such a noble language feature could never have developed for some nefarious reasons and could never be used for such either, right? I am almost sure that this concern for women found it’s way into the language after the umpteen’th time the eunuchs of the Sultan’s Harem tried to take credit for some good works that the Sultan’s -in the Balkans and the Ukraine kidnaped and then enslaved – multitudes of wives actually did.( Up until the ancient year of 1922 that is, when their Ataturk (Father of the Turks) finally put an end to it.) I cannot imagine any other reason for it.
And so my question is : Are the Philippines, China and Turkey the paragons of gender equality, fair treatment of women and envy of women the whole world over or is the problem somewhere else, rather than in the language? I’ll let everyone to be the judge of that.
I of course understand that this is almost certainly un-postable -even if the English and my grasp of linguistic terminology wasn’t bad – and so I promise that no animals will be harmed if it is just deleted.