Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ ‘Latinx’ ban is ‘performative anti-wokeness’

Dear Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders,

You were so close.

This month, on your first day as governor of Arkansas, you issued an executive order directing the state government to strike the term Latinx from official state documents. Although the term is meant to be gender-neutral (unlike Latino or Latina), you find it problematic, and — given its limited uptake among self-identified U.S. Hispanic and Latino adults — you’re not entirely wrong.

You framed your rule to sound progressive, even sensitive: “Executive Order to Respect the Latino Community by Eliminating Culturally Insensitive Words From Official Use in Government.” Gosh, that sounds almost — can I say this out loud? — woke.

You did research. (Or at least you Googled.) You cited a 2020 Pew study that found only 3% of U.S. Hispanic people used the term Latinx; more than three-quarters hadn’t even heard of it. (You did some research, anyway; you ignored a more recent 2022 Axios-Ipsos Poll in partnership with Noticias Telemundo that found more than half of Mexican Americans are good with the term. Polls are fake news, right?)

You included lines like, “It is the policy of the Governor’s administration to prohibit the use of culturally insensitive words for official state government business.” Can’t argue that. (I could argue with your self-aggrandizing capitalization of Governor, but we’ll fight that battle another day.)

And you cited authorities, such as “Real Academia Española, the Madrid-based institution which governs the Spanish language,” which has rejected the use of Latinx. Sounds very official — though given that the institution is based in Spain, not Latin America, it’s a bit like Brits saying American English is invalid because we spell it color instead of colour.

There are just two problems.

First, you’re trying to dictate language use from the top down, and that’s not how language works.

You’re trying to dictate language use from the top down.

And second, it takes only a quick glance at the context in which you released this executive order to see you don’t care about “culturally insensitive words” at all.

There appears to be recent liberal precedent for an order like this. In 2016 President Barack Obama signed a bill eliminating the use of Negro and Oriental in government documents. This was after the 2010 U.S. Census — also under Obama — included Negro as a racial designation.

But there’s one key difference: Obama was discontinuing the use of outdated terms that are now considered offensive. You, Gov. Sanders, are striking terms whose usage is on the upswing, seeking to kill them in the cradle. A governor has a lot of power, but I have bad news for you: That’s not your call.

Maybe those terms wouldn’t have caught on anyway. Why are you worried?

To answer that question, one need only look at the other executive orders you issued that day — especially the grossly anti-education “Executive Order to Prohibit Indoctrination and Critical Race Theory in Schools.” It makes a lot of noise about how CRT is “antithetical to the traditional American values of neutrality, equality, and fairness” without — and this is important — defining what CRT is or how it is nonneutral, unequal, or unfair. (Side note: Since when is the U.S. neutral about anything? We’re free, but we’re not Swiss.)

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It appears you care less about “respect [for] the Latino community” and more about performative anti-wokeness for the MAGA base. That’s just as bad as performative wokeness — something I’m not a fan of either.

You don’t have to like the gender-neutral Latinx, an imperfect solution for a language that’s rooted in masculine and feminine forms of words, yet exists in a world that now has a wider understanding of gender. But whether it’s taken up in our lexicon isn’t up to you, or even me. Spanish, like English, has evolved across centuries, and it will continue to do so long after you’ve left office.

Keep watching to find out where our language goes. You might learn something.

Siempre,

The Grammarian

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and comas en serie to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.