yup, struggle session time

edit: no one is right, everyone is wrong :^)

edit 2: this post is actually dedicated to Amy Goodman, please stop trying to sound cool grandma

8 points

Nah fuck you, I’ll say what I like. I say Latinx and Desi and Indian and Black, because members of those communities who are activists taught me to say those terms and I like 'em

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12 points
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People in this thread seem convinced that it’s a US only phenomenon. Latines in our home countries also use these terms for ideological reasons. It’s insulting how many brush this off as “colonialist intervention”. Ignoring how the RAE still works as a colonialist tool that attempts to regulate our language.

We also care about non binary genders and feminism in our not-US countries, in case anybody didn’t know.

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8 points

Exactly! I didn’t even learn the term Latinx from a US-based person, I just thought it was great because whatever dumbass crackers hate this word don’t realize that gender neutral terms are not common in Romance languages. Like why the fuck in French do I have to use ils, even if there’s one man and fifty women? What about if a nonbinary person is in the group? Dumb as hell.

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the solution is actually really easy. so much of the gendering is done via vowels, so you just pull an english and dump schwas in there. Əls sont à la boulangerie.

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10 points

Misguided leftists are like: So I see many white liberals use this one word to look woke… time to shit on this entire concept to be even woker.

Please comrade, we use the x or the e for any word that refers to people. Pronouns, nouns, adjectives and articles. It’s more complex than that. No, comrade, noooo.

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9 points

And here I am telling you “latinks” makes no sense. Use latines if you wanna be woke

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1 point

It doesn’t have to make sense to you, it’s a goddamn word. It’s big in queer Spanish-speaking circles and I don’t gotta justify that shit to you.

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9 points
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Ok, chill. I told you that cuz I am native spanish speaker from latin america and I was c9nvinced that term was invented by murican whities trying to outwoke everyone. Also, again, the spanish-originated genderless word for latin people is “latines”, heavily used in queer circles. But obviously, if your friends like that term use it, it’s not like it’s a slur nor anything.

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Desi is hardly a new term though. It’s derived from a Hindi word that’s derived from Sanskrit

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-1 points

i have no idea what it means and no i won’t be looking it up

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Desi means local/indigenous. In English or outside of the Indian subcontinent, Desi is used to say indegenous to the Indian subcontinent, so Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi people

desh means “native land”, which is why it is in Bangladesh.

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4 points

It doesn’t matter if the word is new or not, the point is that the word is being used to refer to a group of people when they’ve told me to use it.

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4 points

Why not use Latine? Am I missing some cultural context that makes that any less inclusive than Latinx? Plus if you follow that pattern, you can actually un-gender other parts of the language, if you so please, without saying “ekis” constantly.

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-4 points

If other Spanish speakers decide to go that route, cool. Until then I’m going to use the term that they all like.

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4 points
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Someone else posted that almost nobody likes it?

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10 points
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Latinx is cringe and should be abolished for that reason alone

also stop saying Indian unless you’re talking about actual Indian people (Sioux people aren’t Indian, they’re Native)

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People indigenous to the US very often call themselves american indians. I’ve seen so much fake outrage over this one it’s really weird. The same can be said about the word gypsy which many romani also call themselves. The indigenous version of the black panthers was called the American Indian movement ffs.

It’s one thing when this stuff is based from a place of being respectful vs others where it’s entirely based on trying to signal how educated you are to others part of the liberal activist ingroup.

Funny enough I’m pretty sure the word indian never was intended to mean a particular place. It was just a word for the people over there. That’s why all of southern Asia, oceania, and the americas were referred to as Indian.

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3 points

some call themselves Indian, some call themselves Native, others call themselves Elizabeth Warren.

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I feel like “indigenous” covers all the bases personally.

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1 point
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It’s not fake outrage, it just makes things harder to talk about.

“Gypsy” might have been offensive once but the difference is that noone else was called a Gypsy.

“Caucasian” and “Indian” (among others) literally take words and redefined them to make white people feel better. And centuries later people still don’t understand the history of why this happened.

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1 point

And to those people I would say that “Indian” remained in use to a large extent because it served as propaganda to make Native peoples seem less Native to the continent, thus justifying their extermination.

It also makes discussion needlessly complicated as it shares a name with a continent of 1.6 billion people half a world away

Of course, if you’d like to keep using it that’s your decision

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2 points
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14 points
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1 point

You’re American Indian :^)

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24 points
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I’m Indian and we call ourselves Indian. I don’t get mad when settlers call us Native or Indian. I appreciate the mindset that gets people to say Native instead of Indian, their hearts are in the right place.

In my ideal world, Indian and Native would be dropped in favor of the actual nations name (like Sioux, Dene, Cree, etc.) but often these nations were merged or completely wiped out or the entire nation had its culture wiped out. It would also require an enormous educational and cultural reform in settler America and Canada and people would actually have to learn the name of the nations that lived in their local area and most of the big ones, so I’m not holding my breath.

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10 points

I’ve been told by a Lakota friend that they get a kick out of being called “indian” because “it reminds us of the white man’s stupidity.”

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4 points
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It wasn’t stupidity, it was an unspoken racialized propaganda campaign to create a feeling of “white nativity”. That’s why I hate the term, and a lot of Native people I’ve talked to agree (shoutout to r/NativeAmerican, one of the only tolerable spaces on reddit). These Know Nothing posters (the 1800s equivalent of Trumpers) weren’t talking about Cherokee and Lakota.
https://mholloway63.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/8420605e.jpg
https://i.redd.it/pz46gslpv7j01.jpg

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3 points
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Genuinely curious: Would you be upset if a Punjabi/Tamil etc. person identified themselves as American Indian?

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No, I personally wouldn’t.

I can’t imagine a context where they’d be trying to claim to be from one of the nations that was here pre-Columbus, anyway. If they were, I would be upset just the same as if they were Italian or Malay and trying to get in on that Indian cred. I’m sure people like that could be cheeky about it and be like “but I AM Indian and I AM American” but that’d just make me roll my eyes rather than be truly upset.

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i say indian cuz the folks at the rez told me to

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5 points
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2 points
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everyone who was here before Columbus is American, US citizens aren’t real Americans

exactly.

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49 points

No, I won’t. As a non binary language and linguistics student who is also Latine.

I prefer to use Latine, because it makes the most sense within the language and phonetically. I can get why the “x” is odd. I’ll use it when writing sometimes if I’m being lazy but never in speech. The whole discourse about how it’s supposedly some US imposition on us is revisionist nonsense. There have always, always been nonbinary people in Latin America.

Of course people haven’t heard of it. Of course if you poll people they will lean conservative. A LOT of Latine culture is plagued by machismo and catholicism. We are incredibly conservative. That there is division in the community doesn’t mean you should default to siding with the overwhelmingly conservative sidebecause they’re louder and larger in numbers. Let us figure out our own shit, we’re on that, but stop acting like the addition of a gender neutral alternative is some perversion of the language because it supposedly came from the US. What you are doing is repeating Latin American conservative talking points (replace “the US” with “the devil”) and are silencing people that should be your allies. You should give a shit about us.

Spanish is an imposed, colonialist language anyway. Our history is colonialism. We adapt and we change our language to serve us better because that’s the entire point of language. Language is meant to be flexible and exists so we can express ourselves. I can’t express myself in a language that denies my existence, so I change it. It’s 100% fine and the RAE can kiss my ass.

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Spanish is an imposed, colonialist language anyway.

Found the American Hispanic

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26 points

It is, though? Like do you think the Tainos and the Caribs were speaking Spanish?

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Do you think the Cherokees were speaking English? No, but if you suggested this idea to an American it would not resonate with them.

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0 points
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11 points
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7 points

hispanic is gender neutral already

Stahp, that is not a synonym for Latine. Won’t anybody think of the Brazilians.

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21 points
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All I gotta say is thank god the two languages I speak, German and Russian, are not widely spoken in the US so our attempts at doing gender inclusivity aren’t met with American struggle sessions about imposing American values on the world. For the record, in Austria the usage of the Binnen I is exceedingly common in both leftist circles and is becoming pretty common in wider society too. With the Binnen I, instead of writing “students (m) and students (f)” as “Studenten und Studentinnen”, you write StudentInnen. People also often include non-binary people by using a “gap”, writing Student_innen or Student*innen. It’s been a thing since the 1980s, gradually increasing in popularity.

I don’t speak Spanish and am not part of the community so obviously I’ll defer to others about latinx vs latine. No dog in that fight. I just wanted to express solidarity because all the Anglos in the thread talking about the imposition of English language norms, like the rest of us can’t come to the idea that using gender neutral language is beneficial to women and queer people ourselves, is infuriating.

EDIT: Oh no oh no, fucking Anglos making the city write RadfahrerInnen (cyclist (m/f)) on a sign , poor us!!!

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11 points

Ahhh, German checking in to get you the struggle session you deserve, I have problems talking about non-binary people in German when they’re not there or don’t speak German. Obviously when they’re available one could always just ask them, but what pronouns would one use for people who use they/them pronouns? “Es” - “It” seems pretty dehumanising. Or how would one refer to a non-binary doctor? Arzt and Ärztin are both heavily gendered, and there is not really a neutral term.

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The natural solution along these lines would be Ärztx, right?

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13 points

I’ve been following the discussions and tbh I don’t think there’s a consensus yet. Same with non-binary people in Russian - a non-binary person I follow on Twitter uses он/а [s/he], I’ve seen someone else use оно [it], which yes comes across as dehumanising to me as well but if that’s what they prefer I can’t yell NO YOU CAN’T!! at them. I think some people just continue using he/she, or prefer people to switch within a conversation. I don’t really wanna do a struggle session about it because I’m not non-binary lmao, again I’ll just defer to them. I’m sure as acceptance spreads, one form will win out eventually, as it always is with language.

My point is simply that these conversations are taking place in non-Anglo communities - it’s not like every non-binary person has given up on German/Russian and decided that being non-binary is an Anglo imposition.

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13 points
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13 points
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ITT white leftists talking about how to refer to minorities

Just a small thing.

Making fun of the X in gender inclusive spanish is akin to making transphobic jokes. Its what the chuds in latinamerica do.

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-4 points
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13 points

The word completely disregards the Spanish language. Who tf thought it was a good idea?

Latinos is already gender neutral in a technical sense, but if you really wanna be woke about it at least use something that sounds reasonably Spanish like Latines.

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10 points

Latinos is not gender neutral. Its the accepted use, just as much as any adjective that refers to a group of people is used in masculine (todos, nosotros, amigos, etc…). And its exactly that usage of masculine adjectives in spanish that is being fought upon. Latino is just another example.

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2 points
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You’re pushing the line between what counts as “accepted” and what is just a rule of the language. From a descriptivist standpoint, ‘latinos’ describes either a group of men, or a group that has at least one man, so gender neutral-ish. I assume when you don’t know the gender of anyone in the group, you would also use ‘latinos’, making it mostly gender neutral.

But yeah, defaulting to masculine is part of why people are trying to make new terms (alongside including enbys). ‘Latinx’ just isn’t good though.

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4 points
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I assume when you don’t know the gender of anyone in the group, you would also use ‘latinos’, making it mostly gender neutral.

Not exactly, this rule basically says, instead of thinking about the gender of the group im referring to, I will assume they are male, at least by majority.

This continues to spark a similar debate about: If a group of only latina women is referred by feminine pronouns, does a single man in a group of a hundred women necessarily indicate they will all be treated as men? If not, where is the line drawn?

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0 points

Nah, Latines sounds too much like latrines, I could see that resulting in a third joke for the chuds

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