On Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) slammed Democrats who refuse to utilize progressive terminology like “Latinx.”
In a short outburst on Instagram, Ocasio-Cortez chastised lawmakers who refuse to employ the woke lingo.
“I also have a mini-rant about this because there are some politicians, including Democratic politicians, that rail against the term ‘Latinx.’ And they’re like, ‘this is so bad, this is so bad for the party,’ like blah blah blah,” Ocasio-Cortez stated.
Earlier in her video, the New York Democrat said that gender and language are both malleable, and she asked people to quit making a big deal out of the use of the Latinx term.
While Ocasio-Cortez claims to be concerned about inclusion, a Gallup poll found that just 4% of Hispanics favor the moniker Latinx. According to another scathing poll, a large number of Hispanics consider the phrase derogatory.
The majority of Hispanics oppose the usage of the name Latinx since it has no grammatical meaning in Spanish.
Spanish makes use of grammatical gender, a linguistic trait found in around a quarter of all languages. Grammatical gender is often unrelated to biological gender and serves to establish grammatical consistency across languages that utilize it.
This is why Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.) banned his staff from using the word Latinx last year.
“To be clear, my office is not permitted to use the term “Latinx” in official communications,” Gallego said. “When Latino politicos use the term it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.”
