We have reported several times before (here and here for starters) that Hispanics hate the intersectional term (“Latinx”) that the identity politics left have tried to force everyone to use. Now there’s a fancy quantitative study entitled “The X Factor: How Group Labels Shape Politics.” It is by two leftist academics from Harvard and Georgetown who ratify the hatred of the term, and note that the term is driving Latino voters to Trump:
Latinos who oppose “Latinx” are less likely to support politicians who used or are associated with “Latinx”; Latinos in areas where “Latinx” is more salient are more likely to switch their vote toward Trump between 2016-2020.
But then the fun begins. Instead of following common sense and casting doubt on the promiscuous expansion of politically-correct labels, the authors double down identity politics by blaming—wait for it!—racist Republicans and transphobic Hispanics. They’ve come up with theory with a fancy name:
We present an Identity-Expansion-Backlash Theory (IEBT) to explain how the use of more inclusive group labels by politicians may generate political backlash from relevant group members, particularly, group members who are negatively predisposed toward newly included or salient subgroup members. . . Latinos are less likely to support a politician who uses the phrase “Latinx,” a gender-inclusive group label, in their appeals to the Hispanic/Latino community; Latinos who oppose the phrase “Latinx” to describe the broader Latino/Hispanic community are less likely to support Democratic politicians who have used or are associated with “Latinx.” Moreover, we demonstrate these statistical patterns are driven by Republican, conservative and anti-LGBTQ+ Latinos that we may expect to be predisposed against the inclusion of queer and gender minority Latinxs.
In a tweet-thread explaining the study in more plain English, one of the authors says:
Amanda and I think we should still be using gender-inclusive language. The problem for Democrats is that segments of the Latino community that are queerphobic and would otherwise support them are less likely to do so if queerness is made salient through inclusive language.
In other words, the only reason Latinx has not caught on is that too many Hispanics are bigots. File this as another example of an ideologically-driven, non-falsifiable theory.
P.S. I did learn the new up-and-coming acronym for blacks in the article, because apparently BIPOC is not inclusive enough, or something. The new term is “ADOS,” which stands for “American Descendants of Slavery.” There’s a backstory here that is embarrassing to the BIPOC crowd: recent black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean tends to be more successful in America than our more established black population, likely because these recent immigrants aren’t educated in a grievance mentality that makes racism an excuse for everything.
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