The one that continually upsets me (as someone who grew up in a predominantly Hispanic community, is married to a Hispanic person, has Hispanic children, and speaks Spanish as a fluent second language and in the home) is the use of the term "LatinX" which has spread through the DEI community and now general HR. I, a white man, despite my involvement in Latin culture cannot push back against this offensive term, which is quite literally colonialistic with white people from other countries (mostly Americans) telling Latin PoC globally what the appropriate term is to self-identify with. I've attempted to do so, and it's gotten me in trouble, despite the truth and cultural basis of my arguments.
DEI would be questionable but not objectionable if it only pushed actual factual truth, but because it's mostly subjective ideological zealotry, it's incredibly objectionable, and actually racist, more racist than those who are in opposition to it, but seems to have been granted a monopoly on determining what is and isn't racist or unacceptable by the Western elites.
He is also fair skinned, blonde and blue eyed - as is his family. He objectively looks "white". Why does it matter? Because in the current DEI world, he and children can mark "Hispanic" or "Latino" on all forms (I may be wrong here on whether it is both).
His children will therefore benefit from many advantages granted by DEI benefactors. Lost in this crazy DEI calculus is that this is a wealthy family.
Your friend is one of those cases, and I am not blaming him or his kids for utilizing the current situation to their advantage, and I don't feel particularly bad about someone getting a lucky hand and playing it well. Good for him and his kids.
But on the flipside, imagine being an asian-american kid coming from a poor family. Not only you get disadvantaged by the financial situation in your household, you then get screwed over by the DEI initiatives on top of that. Too bad, kid, shoulda aligned with the "stereotypes" assigned to your race by DEI better and had well-earning and educated parents. And given how DEI policy supporters often use the "it is for the greater good as a society" argument, it feels doubly dirty and insulting to those individuals.
Even the factual outcomes and effects of such policies aside, officially assigning those "economic stereotypes" to various ethnic groups and treating individual people in those groups based on those "stereotypes" (derived from aggregated data for that group) just feels icky.
This, in fact, is one of the major difficulties with DEI. My identity has no bearing on the truth or falsity of my words, my observations, or my statements. It is simply the truth that "LatinX" does not work in the Spanish language, it's effectively unpronounceable, and it is directly targeting a language feature from the perspective of English speakers as applied to a another language, which means that in so many ways it is insulting, offensive, and colonialistic. It should not require one to identify as Hispanic or Latino to say this (or to be aware of it). It feels intentionally racist, because anyone who purports to be representing the ideal of helping this community should surely be aware of such basic things about Hispanic culture and the Spanish language.
Not to mention all the other classism issues that said natives face at the hands of non-native learners/speakers, including accent discrimination when the others literally only use English phonemes.
And I'm not part of that language's native speaker group, I just recognise they should probably be included in stuff said about it, and try to respect what native speakers say, even if it's not how English works.
This is what happened in many colleges.
1. Certain job listings mandate adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles.
2. Candidates with the strongest understanding of DEI typically come from privileged backgrounds, such as private K-12 schools and Ivy League universities, and tend to be white.
3. These applicants are able to "out-perform" other applicants in terms of DEI understanding.
4. As a result, the faculty continues to be predominantly white and wealthy.
5. Profit.
Seriously, I would be surprised if there is not a broken spoken language.
English is completely messed up. I don't know how anyone learns it.
Why do you think they may have adopted it?
> The Spanish language is not broken and does not need to be fixed.
Latinx is an English word. English words are not necesarily gendered, and English linguistic culture has evolved away from gendered nouns.
"Latine" is better for English, though.
https://theconversation.com/stop-using-latinx-if-you-really-...
If LGBTQ+ people want to use the term Latinx to refer to themselves, that's fine. But they don't get to make that decision for the 98% who are fine with "Latino" or "Latina."
There is already an established way to make this term non-gendered, either drop the gender suffix entirely Latin, or make it explicit by using Latine. Both are which are existing words in Spanish with an established meaning. Rather than use this, activists in the US decided to demand 640 million people change their language to appease those who don't even understand their language.
IMO, genders on objects without a sex are just non sensical and a legacy product of Roman Latin evolution. A simple -e suffix could potentially fix this, but it's incredibly hard to change without a generational change, cause language and habits are sticky. However if you are triggered by a table being female gendered or a car being male gendered, maybe you are overthinking it.
When it comes to human related words, another potential approach is to always use the female form, because you refer to the word person (la persona) and not the particular gender of the individual in question. This applies to groups too, the rule in Spanish is that if a group has females and males, you should use the "male" plural form. Why not just use the female form and everyone is happy?
Just remark that this is a hot topic and conservative and older people usually oppose this aggressively and openly. New generations understand the arbitrary split of society in two based on the presence of a penis more intrinsically though.
> "Latinx organizations share hopes for Futuro Latino Fund"
> The grant is meant for nonprofits and organizations that help support Latinx communities.
> Garcia said Latinx people understanding their history is important for community development.
> "As Chicanos, as we grew up understanding that America, the United States of America, era nuestra casa, we became interested and connected to American history," he said.
> A lot of Latinos would love to be baseball,
That sounds pretty bigoted, so make a complaint to HR. Putting on a 49ers jersey doesn't make me a true fan.
The thing is DEI efforts oftentimes mask comical understanding of history and blindingly gross racism.
Personal anecdote: How do you deal with people who proudly wear "Antiracist" t-shirts, but will quickly tell you Asians are opportunity hoarders who must hate their kids because they focus too much on academics. Or how do you explain indentured servitude, wars and famine have been commonplace all through history.