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by rosterface 2656 days ago
I'm Hispanic and have resigned myself to this as well. While I may benefit from getting a job, I'm still subjected to what I would consider racism which I have to publicly turn a blind eye to. I'll give an example:

"Latinx" is not a thing. Yet, I need to listen to a lot of white and other non-hispanic people say it all of the time. It feels like someone just reached into our culture, ripped out its core identity and rebranded it (supposedly in our favor?). I dare not say anything about it though, part of accepting the job with the diversity bonus is that the same people that granted you that power can take it away at the drop of a hat.

2 comments

I grew up in a majority hispanic community, but I'm not hispanic. I find it very hard to say "latinx" because that's not the label used when I was growing up. However, "hispanic" is apparently exclusive and should be avoided. I've asked my hispanic friends what they think about "latinx". They all hate it and never use it themselves. One said of the recent PC wave: "This is all perpetrated by clueless people, almost all white, who tell us what problems we suffer from and how we should solve them." I fall into the LGBT bucket and that's a different minefield, but I can sympathize.

I got off topic. Nonetheless I agree that if I were to constructively criticize these often misimplemented diversity initiatives, it wouldn't be well received. Meanwhile I'll let the compound interest do its thing.

It's always awkward when the Anglo-sphere tries to see parts of the world with their racial lens. To be frank it's pretty ridiculous that we consider everyone from Asia to be the same race (literally 60% of the world population that encompasses people like this [1], this [2], and this [3] under one label, all three groups would probably see themselves as distinct races).

My understanding is that "Latinx" refers to people that are ethnically Mexico, Central America, and South American (and some parts of the Caribbean like Dominican Republic). Whereas "Hispanic" broadly refers to people who are from Spain's former colonies in the New World. So "Latinx" refers to race, but "Hispanic" refers to culture and encompasses people of a variety of races.

The US government is at least making progress. The US census disconnected "Hispanic" from the race category starting in 2010 [4]. So now people like me can appropriately say that I am racially white but also Hispanic.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chinese+people&t=canonical&iar=ima...

2. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tajik+people&t=canonical&iax=image...

3. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dravidian+people&t=canonical&iar=i...

4. https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/abo...

My issue is with the made up term "Latinx" vs the correct Latino.
I find "Latinx" cringeworthy as well. Spanish defaults to the masculine adjective when referring to an unspecified group. If gendered adjectives bother someone, just use the English word: "Latin".