Apparently the word “Latinx” is so offensive, hated, and threatening that it was a priority for Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders to ban it from state government on her first day in office.
Sanders, a Republican, is the first woman elected governor of Arkansas, the youngest governor in the country at 40 years old, and the highest profile former member of the Trump administration currently in office. Latinx is a relatively new gender-neutral term used to describe people of Latino or Hispanic origin that has caused a measure of divisiveness among the Hispanic community in the United States, a controversy that is often misconstrued.
On Tuesday, she signed seven executive orders, including the order banning the use of the term “Latinx” in state government. Sanders bizarrely cited the Real Academia Española, which officially rules the Spanish language, to reject Latinx in Arkansas. Never mind that Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in 2018. Sanders also referred to the word “as ethnically insensitive and pejorative” and called it a government responsibility to “respect its citizens and use ethnically appropriate language, particularly when referring to ethnic minorities.”
Yes, Sanders actually said that banning the word Latinx was out of respect to ethnic minorities. Cue major eye roll. It’s a particularly rich argument coming from someone whose previous job as White House press secretary was to be the spokesperson for the Trump administration and to staunchly defend Donald Trump’s policy decisions, many of which had a terrible, lasting impact on Black and brown people. Remember when she defended Trump’s family separation policy at the US-Mexico border, which mainly affected Latinx migrants seeking asylum, by saying that “it is very biblical to enforce the law” and that “it’s a moral policy to follow”? Or when she denied that Trump’s White House was racist, or “racially charged,” even though there’s ample evidence of Trump’s views? To wit: his comments against immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti and El Salvador; his attempts to ban immigrants from Muslim countries; or his attack on a federal judge for his Mexican ancestry.
Of course Sanders is not Trump, and one can argue that as a spokesperson she was merely doing her job by defending her boss before the press corps. But with her executive order, it’s clear she is borrowing from Trump’s MAGA Republican playbook. Sanders is pretending to be culturally sensitive by doing the opposite and weaponizing semantics when it is politically convenient to do so.
Sure, words matter. But if Sanders really cared about pejorative language, she’d also issue an executive order banning the use of other words that are widely repudiated among Latinos, such as “illegal aliens” or “illegal immigrants.” Reporter Rafael Bernal of The Hill asked Sanders’s office about banning these terms. He told me he has yet to receive a response.
It seems like Sanders is capitalizing on a linguistic controversy in order to deflect from the substantive challenges that Latinos face. It’s another example of Republicans trying to make Latinos invisible. There are roughly a quarter of a million Latinos in Arkansas, representing about 8.3 percent of the total population, according to the US Census. About 22 percent of them live in poverty, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s what I’d rather see Sanders address.
To be fair, it’s not only Republican politicians who decry the usage of Latinx, which brings me to the reasons why the term is so divisive. US Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona, has instructed his staff to avoid using the term. Gallego told Vox last year that many Latinos agreed with him in rejecting the word, that he feels the term “was imposed upon the community,” and that “it was coming mostly from white progressives.” It’s true that many Hispanics hate the word, and many pundits and politicians typically point to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll that said that only 3 percent of Latinos use Latinx to identify themselves.
That piece of evidence has always struck me as irrelevant. Of course only a small number of people use Latinx — it’s a relatively new term and, as language evolves and expands, it takes time for new labels supported by younger generations to gain ground in the mainstream. Another statistic is more instructive: A similar Gallup poll found a majority of Hispanics — 57 percent — said “that a choice among the labels ‘Hispanic,’ ‘Latino,’ ‘Latinx’ or another term didn’t matter to them.”
Indeed, why should we care that some Hispanic Americans prefer to call themselves Latinx? To me, the term has always been about inclusivity in the United States. Meanwhile, Sanders is making it a point to exclude some Latinos in Arkansas who have chosen to identify as Latinx. “To Latinx or not Latinx” has become an exhausting and silly debate — it’s time to move on and focus on substantive policy issues that really matter.
Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.