No doubt about it when it comes to presumptuous white people, Democrats and Republicans alike, deciding how we Latinos should describe ourselves, X marks the spot. 

I can’t decide what I find more offensive. The fact that white liberals like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren took it upon themselves awhile back to decide that the focus thing to do was to lump together Latinos and Latinas and house us under the non-binary gender neutral term of Latinx, or the fact that now a white conservative, like newly-minted Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, would feel the urgency as one of her first official acts after being sworn in to ban most state agencies from using the term Latinx. 

Hey, guys, not to sound ungrateful. I mean, I really appreciate it was so considerate of you, both the folks on the right and on the left to assume the burden of sorting all this out on behalf of Latinos, so that my compadres and I could enjoy our tacos, while having our siesta under cactus with our donkey by our side. Muchas gracias. But still, as a Latino from a predominantly Latino family as well as a circle of friends that’s also largely Latino, all I know is as far as I can tell, no one asked us for our opinion about any of this. 

The whole thing has an offensive bipartisan ring to it. It’s as if people who claim to be acting in our best interests really have no personal interest at all, in what we want. Imagine that. In signing the executive order banning Latinx, Sanders called the word culturally insensitive. That is an interesting choice of words coming from a Republican given that the GOP wrote the book on cultural insensitivity to Latinos, often using the immigration issue like a club. They call Arkansas the natural state. But there’s nothing natural or logical about Sanders’ attack on the term Latinx. The ban gives agencies 60 days to revise written materials to comply. It shouldn’t take even 60 minutes, since the word does not appear to be widely used in Arkansas government. 

In fact, it’s likely that the entire kerfuffle is simply about tweaking the woke liberals, which ask around just so happens to be one of my favorite pastimes. But that doesn’t mean I feel like giving conservatives a pass, either. If right-wingers like Sanders have suddenly found religion, and want to continue their efforts to win over Latino voters in time for the 2024 presidential election, I can think of about 50 other issues that Latinos consider more pressing than whether or not the state of Arkansas – which is after all, only about 8% Latino – actually sanctions the term Latinx instead of trying to fix the way that Latinos self identify.

How about you just fix the way that Latinos are getting shortchanged by the public schools, the police, the criminal justice system, the health care system, Wall Street, Main Street, Sesame Street…you get the point. I don’t like Latinx. And polls show that only about 3% of Latinos actually use the damn word. The League of United Latin American Citizens LULAC, the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights group, has also dumped the term. The truth is, most Latinos hate the word Latinx almost as much as they hate another term that was slapped on us by white folks back in the late 1970s. And that term is Hispanic. 

Look, nearly 50 years later, that word is still around. We’re gonna need a wooden cross and some holy water to get rid of that sucker. So good luck, Governor Sanders. Good luck with that Latinx ban of yours. It may score you some points with other white Republican governors, a couple of whom are also busy tweaking the woke liberals by shipping Latino refugees to faraway cities, just for the fun of it. But your stunt likely won’t do much to improve the lives of Latinos in the state of Arkansas or anywhere else. Oh, I’m sorry. Was that item never on the agenda?