Will Elizabeth Warren's cluelessness finally end "Latinx"?

I wonder if perhaps with people like Matthew Yglesias1 finally tweeting stuff like this (and publishing a corresponding article in Vox) that perhaps people will finally start to get it.

It's almost certainly a lost cause though. She's emblem of a certain class who seem to think that as long as they yammer about how "inclusive" they are they'll gain the votes of certain demographics - when the people in question have frequently indicated how little they care for certain terms. In the case of Latinx:

We presented our respondents with seven of the most common terms used to describe Latinos and asked them to select the one that best describes them. When it came to “Latinx,” there was near unanimity. Despite its usage by academics and cultural influencers, 98% of Latinos prefer other terms to describe their ethnicity. Only 2% of our respondents said the label accurately describes them, making it the least popular ethnic label among Latinos.

... Some have speculated that “Latinx” resonates with women and Latino youth. We found no evidence of this in our study. While Latinos’ preferences for other labels vary by age, the limited appeal of “Latinx” is consistent across generations and genders.

A suggested rule for inclusive language: the people being included should at a minimum find the term in question not-the-worse-of-all-available-word-choices. I'd imagine that were you to poll American women they'd also vastly prefer "women" to "womxn". I can't help but be bemused by tweets like this:

It's not just Latinos that Warren's cluelessness applies to - see also Elizabeth Warren Has Won Black Activists. She’s Losing the Black Vote..

As the Vox article illustrates with an overview of polling data by demographic, she's basically only the choice of white people with college degrees and those with post-graduate degrees. Or phrased a different way the preferred candidate of an unrepresentative elite who live in a bubble - a phenomena which by and large includes journalists:


  1. Given his political leanings Ross Douthat's earlier Liberalism's Latinx Problem doesn't count in quite the same way. ↩︎