Sarah Huckabee Sanders Wades Into Culture Wars With Ban on Term ‘Latinx’

One of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s first acts as Arkansas governor was to ban most state agencies from using the gender-neutral term Latinx, tapping into a debate that’s divided Hispanics along generational lines.It was among several orders the 40-year-old former White House press secretary —now the nation’s youngest sitting governor — signed within hours of taking office that were cheered by conservatives, including restrictions on teaching critical race theory in public schools and banning TikTok on state devices. The Latinx prohibition gives agencies 60 days to revise written materials to comply.“I banned the use of ‘Latinx’ in government because I will not permit my administration to use culturally insensitive words that greatly offend the vast majority of Hispanics,” Ms. Sanders tweeted Sunday. “No matter what the liberal corporate media says we will keep the radical left’s agenda out of Arkansas.”Ms. Sanders’ order adds to the debate over a word that’s found little widespread support among Latinos and even prompted backlash from some Democrats. It comes as Republicans have sought to rally around culture war issues. They also are seeking to make inroads with Latino voters, but fell short of the major shifts some in the party were hoping for in last year’s elections.The term Latinx was coined in recent years as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino and Latina, since all nouns in the Spanish language are gendered. Many in the LGBTQ Latino community have embraced the word, but it has been slow to catch on more widely, with some Latino figures calling the term unnecessary.The League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights group in America, announced in 2021 that it would no longer use the term Latinx. The group declined to comment on Ms. Sanders’s order.Congressman Ruben Gallego, a Democrat of Arizona, also said that year his staff was not allowed to use the term in official communications. “When Latino politicos use the term it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use,” Mr. Gallego tweeted in 2021.The Log Cabin Republicans, which represents LGBT members of the party, praised Ms. Sanders’s order. “The term Latinx is just another misguided product of the modern left’s relentless obsession with stripping gender from American life, an obsession that LGBT conservatives fight back against daily,” the group’s president, Charles Moran, said in a statement.Ms. Sanders’s order doesn’t apply to the state’s institutes of higher education or other state agencies considered constitutionally independent, such as the Arkansas Department of Transportation. It also allows the governor to grant exemptions for the word’s use.Several state agencies said they were reviewing their forms to make sure they would comply. The health department spokeswoman, Meg Mirivel, said two jobs that had been unofficially called the Latinx public information coordinator and the Latinx outreach coordinator will continue to work with the Latino community but will no longer include Latinx in their titles.Ms. Sanders isn’t the first governor to ban or restrict the use of certain words. Governor Hochul of New York last year signed a bill removing from state education law the word “incorrigible,” a term that critics had called sexist and racist.In 2015, Governor Scott of Florida was criticized after former officials said they were instructed to not use the terms “climate change” and “global warming.” Mr. Scott, a Republican who now serves in the Senate, denied he banned the terms.Just because the term isn’t universal among Spanish speakers doesn’t mean it’s insensitive to use it, critics of Ms. Sanders’s order have said.“Language is constantly evolving,” the head of the Latino LGBTQ group Association of Latinos/as/xs Motivating Action, Manuel Hernandez, said. “We don’t speak Old English. I’ve never met someone who says ‘thy.’”Mr. Hernandez called Ms. Sanders’ order “an attempt to erase” the LGBTQ Latino community.Ms. Sanders signed the order the day after Arkansas lawmakers kicked off a session that included a bill that would classify drag shows as adult-oriented businesses and another that would ban transgender people from using bathrooms at K-12 schools that align with their gender identity as opposed to their biological sex.Ms. Sanders has also said she would support legislation similar to Florida’s law that forbids instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Critics have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.Ms. Sanders’s executive order banning Latinx cites a 2020 report from Pew Research Center, which found that one in four American Latinos have heard the term “Latinx,” but just 3 percent use it.Age is an important factor. Hispanics ages 18-29 are six times more likely than older generations to have heard of the term — 42 percent compared with 7 percent of those ages 65 or older, Pew found. Its popularity has risen since 2016, but remains below Latina, Latino, and Hispanic, according to the report.“If you’re trying to categorize a community with the term that they seemingly are rejecting or in some cases are even openly hostile against, it makes sense that that term would in essence, go the way of the dodo, which Latinx seems to have done,” the president of Bendixen & Amandi, a multilingual public opinion research firm, Fernand Amandi, said.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Wades Into Culture Wars With Ban on Term ‘Latinx’

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