Maybe we’re talking past each other. Spanish is a white language. Latin is a white language. It’s exactly as white as English. It’s totally fine for white people to tell other white people to wrestle with undoing the harm of the oppression that white people caused.
Just because non-white people also speak it doesn’t mean it’s not a white language. Jamaicans speak English. Haitians speak French. Arubans speak Dutch.
It’s very possible we are! In this case I went with Latinx specifically because it’s a term generally used to describe people who aren’t white - and I know quite a few people who would argue that while spanish originates in europe in modern usage it’s primarily a hispanophone american language - a population that are largely considered “brown” and need far less american interference in their lives already… So while I very much see & largely agree with your point here, I think there’s just a slightly different perspective on when “helping” becomes “interfering”
I think part of this fundamentally comes from a collective amnesia / deliberate forgetting about the fact that America is European. Yes, latinidad does need less American meddling, but also, American meddling is just the current formation of European meddling. Yes, white anglophones should not casually police oppressed people’s use of latinates, but at the same time, I have no problem pissing off a whole bunch of white Cuban exiles in Miami. There’s a lot of nuance, and it’s thoughtful to not engage when you don’t feel you don’t have a grasp of that nuance. It’s commendable. I would just caution against the trap of characterizing resistance to European imperialism as a form of imperialism, even if it comes from white USians.
Maybe we’re talking past each other. Spanish is a white language. Latin is a white language. It’s exactly as white as English. It’s totally fine for white people to tell other white people to wrestle with undoing the harm of the oppression that white people caused.
Just because non-white people also speak it doesn’t mean it’s not a white language. Jamaicans speak English. Haitians speak French. Arubans speak Dutch.
It’s very possible we are! In this case I went with Latinx specifically because it’s a term generally used to describe people who aren’t white - and I know quite a few people who would argue that while spanish originates in europe in modern usage it’s primarily a hispanophone american language - a population that are largely considered “brown” and need far less american interference in their lives already… So while I very much see & largely agree with your point here, I think there’s just a slightly different perspective on when “helping” becomes “interfering”
I think part of this fundamentally comes from a collective amnesia / deliberate forgetting about the fact that America is European. Yes, latinidad does need less American meddling, but also, American meddling is just the current formation of European meddling. Yes, white anglophones should not casually police oppressed people’s use of latinates, but at the same time, I have no problem pissing off a whole bunch of white Cuban exiles in Miami. There’s a lot of nuance, and it’s thoughtful to not engage when you don’t feel you don’t have a grasp of that nuance. It’s commendable. I would just caution against the trap of characterizing resistance to European imperialism as a form of imperialism, even if it comes from white USians.