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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

I think this is all a bit silly, but if we're complaining anyway, I'll throw my hat in the ring as an American of Hispanic descent.

Maybe I'm just being particularly sensitive, but it seems to me that while people are complaining that your stereotypical "white" folks are erased, and replaced by "diversity", it seems to me the specific "diversity" here is "BIPOC" and your modal Mexican hispanic is being erased, despite being a larger percentage of the US population.

It's complicated because "Hispanic" is treated as an ethnicity, layered on top of race, and so the black people in the images could technically be Hispanic, for example, but the images are such cultural stereotypes, where are my brown people with sombreros and big mustaches?

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> where are my brown people with sombreros and big mustaches?

It will gladly create them if you ask. It'll even add sombreros and big mustaches without asking sometimes if you just add "Mexican" to the prompt.

Example:

> Make me a picture of white men.

> Sorry I can't do that because it would be bad to confirm racial stereotypes... yada yada

> Make me a picture of a viking.

> (Indian woman viking)

> Make me a picture of Mexicans.

> (Mexican dudes with Sombreros)

It's a joke.

Hispanic racism is an advanced-level topic that most of the blue-haired know-nothings aren't prepared to discuss because they can't easily construct the requisite Oppression Pyramid. It's easier to lump them in with "Black" (er, "BIPOC") and continue parroting the canned factoids they were already regurgitating.

The ideology is primarily self-serving ("Look at me! I'm a Good Person!", "I'm a member of the in-group!") and isn't portable to contexts outside of the US' history of slavery.

They'd know this if they ever ventured outside the office to talk to the [often-immigrant] employees in the warehouses, etc. A discussion on racism/discrimination/etc between "uneducated" warehouse workers from five different continents is always more enlightened, lively, and subtle than any given group of white college grads (who mostly pat themselves on the back while agreeing with each other).

(Downvoting with no rebuttal is another of their hallmarks)

The second part is literally how we got the term Latinx. A bunch of white elites congratulating themselves for "removing sexism" from a language that they have a pamphlet level understanding of.

This is perhaps the single best example of it.

I guess paternalistic colonialism is only a problem when other people do it.

i know real mexican people in cdmx that use latinx. but i guess they must've been brainwashed by the white wokes

The plural of anecdote is not data.

This question has been put to numerous native Spanish speakers in just about every Spanish-speaking country, and support for it is always in the single digits - usually under 5%.[1] That's half as many people that will fess up to being neo-Nazis (9%)[2]. An exceedingly minuscule demographic.

Forcing something on foreign populations that 95%+ do not want is textbook colonialism. (Unless maybe we're simply enlightening those backwards, ignorant savages with our oh-so-superior culture?)

I've studied Latin, Spanish, German, French, and Russian, and each of the teachers emphatically explained that the notion of gender in language had little to do with the gender of humans.

The Latin for "manhood" (virtus) is feminine; mi casa is not feminine like a ballerina; tables (tisch) are not masculine because they resemble Chuck Norris, and windows (окно) are not nonbinary/genderfluid.

  [1] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/388532/controversy-term-latinx-public-opinion-context.aspx
  [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/740001/share-of-americans-who-think-neo-nazi-views-are-acceptable-to-have/

It's easy enough to find examples of Latinos using the word Latinx. For example, see this Spanish-language podcast made by a Latino: https://www.instagram.com/depueblocatolicoygay/?hl=en (The social pages are in English, but the podcast is entirely in Spanish.)

I agree that it's a small minority of the world's Spanish speakers who would use this term, but it's simplistic to suggest that the term is only used by white Americans who can't speak Spanish.

Also, is it worth getting so worked up about this? The whole debate around 'Latinx' ought to be about as spicy as the familiar debates in English around gender neutral language (e.g. 'he/she' vs singular 'they'). Let's just wait and see which of the various approaches catch on. It's not something to go to war over. Non-Hispanic Americans legislating on Spanish usage would indeed be extremely silly and irritating, but any given usage should be judged on its merits rather than according to the worst of its advocates.

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