Latin lover
Latino, you say
Latina: BBC home page (above), and BBC Worklife (right).
Another dive into the BBC's culturally-insensitive cultural sensitivity
; specifically its use of Latinx
, and how those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
The BBC's home page touts: Why Latino doulas are essential
. By the time we get to the article/interview itself, they're Latina doulas. But the confusion doesn't stop there.
According to a poll conducted in 2019 by the Pew Research Center, only 5% of Hispanic women in the US use the word Latinx
, and most Hispanics don't like it. So, in the shape of Surey Rodriguez-Cortes, her interviewee advocating for Hispanic doulas in the US, Irina Gonzalez has found an intersection between a minority occupation and a minority language use. My hearty congratulations go to the both of them.
Rodriguez-Cortes seems to swap between Latino
and Latinx
to describe Hispanic doulas and their clients with almost gay abandon, as if she had no shits to give. But, given that most, if not all, doulas who share lived experiences
with Hispanic expectant mothers are likely to be women—real ones, that is—then I'd've thought that Latina
, Hispanic
, or Latin
would've been perfectly adequate adjectives, while at the same time offering no offence to the majority of US Hispanics.
The article ends with a note: This interview was edited for clarity
. But the clarity
doesn't extend to describing Latinas in a culturally-sensitive, rather than right on
light—I guess the words used by the interviewee are her own, are quoted in direct attribution, and thus shouldn't be changed. Ne'ermind…let's just hope no Latinas read it; or at least be thankful that the only racial slur she used was Latinx
, and not spic
. (whistling)